Saturday Night Radio Drama - Joanne Ryan - Eggistentialism

Eggsistentialism

The radio version of the acclaimed stage show. Looking down the barrel of her final fertile years, one modern woman goes on a comical quest to uncover the ifs, hows and crucially the whys of reproducing her genes. No stone is left unturned in this journey of extremes. Family, friends, fertility experts, fortune tellers and the dark recesses of the internet – all are consulted as she tries to figure out…Should making a life for oneself involve making another?

Written and performed by Joanne Ryan.

Featuring the voice of Gloria Ryan.

Cast:

Joanne Ryan (as herself)

Éamonn Hunt (Undertaker)

Joan Sheehy (Fortune Teller)

Rex Ryan (Rob)

Georgina Miller (Receptionist)

All other roles played by members of the company

Director: Veronica Coburn

Sound Designer: Sinéad Diskin

Sound Supervision: Ciarán Dunne and Ciarán Cullen

Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Series Producer, Drama On One: Kevin Reynolds

Still Looking Not Having Much Luck Finding

 promising new audio drama.  Lots of admirable attempts and lots of stuff that's not as admirable but nothing that has struck my fancy for the last couple of weeks.

Maybe I'll hold off for a while.  I read about Jonathon Young's audio drama for The Revisor based on Gogol's The Government Inspector that was used as the text for his collaboration with the choreographer Crystal Pite which sounds fascinating but which I don't think was intended as a stand-alone audio piece.  

This conversation with Jonathon Young and Tiffany Tregarthen - the dancer who embodied and mouth-sunk the part in the audio played by Young was more interesting than any of the audio dramas I auditioned for this week, so I'll post it.

 

Direct link to the video 

Makes me wish I could attend a performance.  I don't think listening to a recording of it would work the way it was intended. 

I am still looking for something new for Saturday Night Radio Drama and am not dropping the project.  It will be back as soon as I find something to post.   Looking back to the so-called golden age, most of what was produced then was schlock, too.  You've got to find the gems in the sludge.

THE ELECTRICITY came back on here, maybe I'll be able to write something if it stays on.   I'd wanted snow, we're getting ice pellets.  

 

Orrin Evans - Mynah / The Eleventh Hour

 

Direct link to video 

Orrin Evans: piano
Vicente Archer: bass
Bill Stewart: drums
Immanuel Wilkins: saxophones

What About Whoopie? OK, If You Insist Ill Go There - Hate Mail

ACCURATE INFORMATION ISN'T reliably produced unscripted, live in front of TV cameras.   I'd never do it, go on to talk live and unscripted.  I'd certainly never do it it several times a week.   Lots of people say lots of stupid things or speak out of ignorance and the more complex and fraught the topic the more likely that is going to happen.  I much prefer to hear someone speaking from a well thought out, well considered script, especially if they have taken the opportunity to check themselves for accuracy and evidentiary support.

I don't watch The View, I don't watch TV except for a few segments of MSNBC and a few other things on Youtube , online.  I wouldn't consider The View to be news, as apparently ABC does.  Which is stupid.  I wouldn't mistake those who are regulars on it to be journalists or scholars, the ones I'm aware of, at least.  I would not fault someone like Whoopie Goldberg who is not a scholar on these topics for speaking out of her experience and observation which is certainly an important part of the issue, though no one's experience is going to be a reliable full picture of this.  As I pointed out this morning.

Whoopie Goldberg got caught up on the difference in defining what "race" is and the differences between what Nazis and America's closest equivalent, white supremacists consider "race" to mean and what other people without their biological ideology use the word "race" to mean.   

Her hastily arranged segment with Stephen Colbert didn't help at all.  It was a disservice to her and the issue for her to go back on so fast.

Nazis and their American allies in white supremacy obviously consider Jews to be of a different race than Germans or Anglo Saxons or whatever master-race the racists favor. they don't always agree with each other on who is "white."  

Other people who are in the business of defining racial groups - in every case a dishonest generalization that has little to no actual scientific meaning - would define many Jews as being white because they have skin that is defined that way.  Of course there are Jews who are not white, there are enormous problems in Israel between some Jews of European heritage who are white racists and Jews who have African heritage and who are discriminated against because of their skin color.   The Israeli media covers those issues, something which seems to be forbidden to talk about in the mainstream media of the United States.  I would recommend the Israeli media and Jewish media in the United States to read about that, one of many issues mainstream media is totally silent about. 

The issue is certainly complex but allowing Nazis and their racist allies to define the term "race" as used in the United States in 2022 has its problems.   As I pointed out Hitler gave the order to his army that invaded Poland to murder all of the Poles, men, women and children and they were certainly carrying out a plan to do that even as they targeted Jews as the first to be murdered.  For the Nazis Poles were not the same race as Germans, I don't think anyone would be in trouble in the United States for pointing out that Poles were, by and large, white.  

I think of all of the things I read and heard about this today, Yair Rosenberg and Chris Witherspoon, together with Joy Reid got farther to the truth and the need to discuss these things to the point of understanding than anything else I've seen.

I think it's important to point out that if TV, entertainment which is pretended to be news can get into this much trouble over this that it reinforces my point about how they can be expected to deal with even more fraught issues.  It can't, it's not in the business of doing that, it should first do no harm. 

I think anyone who was offended by what Whoopie Goldberg said wasn't really listening to what she said and why she said it the way she did.  Certainly for most non-white-supremacist Americans her assumption is wide spread, no population of people with white skin, of largely European ancestry has been subjected to the same kind and brand of racism in the United States as People of Color have been and are now.  George Washington certainly didn't see Jews as being a different race as he so obviously did Black People and Native American People.  Few if any of the Founders did.   Most Jews have always been included in the white mainstream of the United States though, as many other groups of white Americans, they suffered discrimination though seldom as severely as Black Americans and other People of Color. That isn't to diminish the antisemitic violence and stereotyping that happens here,  it isn't a contest that ends up in diminishing the unacceptability of that or any such violence and discrimination.  None of it is acceptable, as I said this morning I'm in favor of the suppression of all such ideology because there is nothing good that comes from it and lots of bad.  

I am also in favor of a deep and thorough exposure of the ideology of biological stereotyping and racism and how deeply that is embedded in not only the public understanding of science but how deeply it is embedded in the theory of natural selection.  I don't think you can eradicate it from biology or science as long as that theory based in class and ethnic and racial inequality is unexamined, unadmitted to and remains embedded within science.  And what you can say about biological science is as true when the topic changes to the law and politics and how it's treated in the media, TV, movies, radio, print, entertainment most dangerously but also academic and journalistic writing.   It's hard to recognize and hard to track down and hard to admit to but if you really want to get rid of it you have no choice no matter how unpopular that is.  You have to be serious about it, comedy never is.

Absolute equality in diversity is the only moral position, absolute equality in effect, not in theory, not in potential.  Absolute equality is the basic and rock bottom requirement of any group or ideology that is admissible in respectable egalitarian democracy, any one or any group that wants admission to an egalitarian democracy must pay total and sincere respect to that as a price of admission.  I would love to see that rule adopted by an effective majority in the American future.  I don't see any way for that to happen by giving up on it at any time.

The Ideology of Nazism Must Be Given The Death Penalty And Executed - Beyond The Conventional Use Of Terms

 

steve simelsFebruary 2, 2022 at 8:19 PM

"The memory and use of the Shoah has been cheapened by show-biz and Hollywood and popular novels, it has certainly been cheapened by its introduction into the stand-up routines of unfunny comedians."

The fact that you can make that comment proves you're an insane anti-semite and total asshole. 

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I HAD REJECTED ABOUT FOUR comments yesterday from Steve Simels who, for some reason, has been trolling me and libeling me for about a decade in this manner because there was no use in repeating what has been repeated.  But this is a good example of what's wrong with the word "antisemitism" which has become used to mean whatever someone wants it to mean and so it risks meaning nothing at all.   And at least half of those uses are lies.

How could my point that the use of the mass murder of six-million Jews by the Nazis by show-biz and Hollywood and novels, cheapening the memory of that enormous crime against all of us and blunting its power to effect our conduct and our speech be an act of "antisemitism"?   Yet that is typical of the use of it by such as would call objection to such use "antisemitism."   It is especially interesting in light of what Deborah Lipstadt is reported to have said in the Religion News Service article I linked to.

Last year, Lipstadt defended a 30-second get-out-the-vote ad from the Jewish Democratic Council of America that juxtaposed imagery from 1930s Germany with footage of neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia; Trump speaking at a rally; and the Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 Jews were massacred in 2018. A shul defaced with graffiti was presented alongside photos of 1930s graffitied Jewish shops.

She explained that she was not comparing the former administration to Nazis. “Had the ad contained imagery of the Shoah,” she said, she would not have defended it.

I think in that there is the very real knowledge from a real historian that there are some things too sacred to use that way EVEN IF IT IS AN OTHERWISE GOOD CAUSE.  It is too casual, it is too informal, it is insufficiently careful and risks the normalization of something that should never be normalized.

I would disagree with her about Trump's antisemitism due to his daughter having been nominally converted to Judaism and supposedly bringing up her children to have a nominal Jewish education.   That may say something about her, it tells us little about Donald Trump who reportedly has a bizarrely non-paternal relationship with even her, his favorite daughter and even more tenuous relationships with his grandchildren.  I think Deborah Lipstadt may be imagining he is more like her than he demonstrates he is.

Donald Trump's many comments and manner of talking about Jews is full of typical negative stereotypes that have incited violence against Jews and resentment which led to other violence.  Compared to the comments Ilhan Omar has made critical of the Israeli government and those who promote its funding and support by the American government, Trump's comments must certainly count as worse than anything I've seen on video from her or read in the media. 

But this is about the use of the Shoah, commonly called the "Holocaust" the attempted genocide of Jews by the Nazis which, like the middle-passage and American slavery, the genocide against the original human inhabitants of the Americas. the Shoah is too serious, the memory of its victims too sacred to be used cheaply by a movie producer, director or writer, from some unfunny person who practices that lazy, commercial innovation in show-biz of the later 20th  century, comedy that is temporarily shocking but which isn't funny.  

The latter might be the worst because it not only cheapens the memory of those murdered, it habituates its audience into thinking that their murders, those which continue are of no real importance that anyone not targeted needs to feel any horror about or opposition to.  THAT IS AN ALL TOO COMMON MODE OF HUMAN THOUGHT, IT IS ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE TOOLS OF GENOCIDALISTS, INDIFFERENCE AND, ESPECIALLY AMUSED INDIFFERENCE.  If you pour over the transcripts of the Rwandan radio station, Radio from a Thousand Hills as I once did you will find that the genocide programs used similar jokes even as they were instructing the killers where to find victims.

I am left thinking of the use of lynching in American comedy, even as the campaign of lynching terror used against Black Americans was horrifically common and it was impossible to get a federal anti-lynching law through the United States Senate.  I have commented on that before giving specific examples from beloved and idolized humorists.  The same could be made about joking references in movies and comedy routines and popular songs about  killing Indians, something actively promoted in the movies and certainly part of the ongoing attempts to murder them.  If you want an example of the intersection between the two, at the very same time Hollywood was promoting a positive image of those engaged in that genocide, the Nazis were gathering statistics from American attempts to finish the job through the Darwinian science of eugenics to help inform their own "racial hygiene" programs.  [I've written posts about all of these things.]

The Shoah should be mentioned only in the most serious of ways, in total honesty and in the context of other such crimes because it doesn't stand alone, even at the time its perpetrators were engaged in other eugenic mass murders, Hitler had clearly stated his intention of killing all of the Poles, explicitly giving the order to do so to his invading troops.  Its use in even supposedly worthy fiction, movies, novels, TV shows is almost impossible to get right.  Any non-documentary movie or show-biz use of it will certainly get the history dangerously wrong, even a documentary movie will inevitably be insufficiently long and nuanced and so risk distorting it.   No one well researched history book will be sufficient without its supporting documentation and consultation with other serious authors on the topic.  

I don't know but I suspect I would go much farther than Deborah Lipstadt in what I've concluded from the Shoah and other genocides of the 20th century and earlier.  My conclusion is that we are morally obligated to take the history of those with total seriousness.  At the very least seriously enough to really make the attempt to make sure they are not repeated.  I think Nazis, white supremacists and others whose ideology of racial and ethnic and gender inequality is inseparable from their ideologies are justifiably and necessarily and totally prevented from promoting their ideologies. 

Any ideology that calls for or supports genocide is certainly rightly suppressed from metastasizing again, we have an absolute and eternal moral obligation to the victims of those in full knowledge that what happened in the past can happen again.  There is an absolute moral obligation to the victims of the Nazis to legally condemn that ideology to death.  We have an absolute moral obligation to the victims of American white supremacy and genocide to condemn that ideology to intellectual death.  You can throw in the various Marxisms that have proven in the real test of time to be at least as murderous and oppressive as Nazism.

The post-war idiocy of the secular liberal democracies,  that we are never to learn even the hardest of lessons from the worst of our history is its definitive refutation.   It is a lesson that no genuine egalitarian democracy of good will could accept and remain that.

The idiocy of free-speech, free-press absolutism that privileges even the worst of lies and ideology over the lives of individuals and millions of people is one of the most morally bereft and stupidest of all failures to learn the lessons of history.  Yet that is what the law in the United States developed into, especially during the Warren Court,  the willful refusal to acknowledge that not all ideologies are equal, that there are some, the contents of which, call for their eradication because they are too dangerous to risk them regaining power. 

Tellingly those almost always call for the eradication of entire races of People.  Any alleged liberal democracy that puts ideologies and words above the lives of People contains a fatal defect.  American liberal democracy and that of most Western governments does contain that fatal defect and today's resurgence of fascism and neo-Nazism on top of those that arose in the early 20th century shows that the first lesson was not learned.

The holding that we are to allow Nazis, white American supremacists and others the right to try to do it again, this time more effectively and for longer because it would be wrong to violate rights that they would be the first to wipe out if they got power is among the stupidest as well as the most universal of delusions among the educated population of the West at the present.   As we are finding in the current resurgence of fascism and neo-Nazism the free-speechy, free-pressy means of countering those has not only not worked IT HAS BEEN OF ENORMOUS USE TO THE BILLIONAIRE AND MILLIONAIRE SPONSORS OF THAT RESURGENCE.    

The idiotic American and British 20th century advocacy for free-speechy, free-pressyness included one of the dumbest of ideas that it would bring about the glorious socialist if not Marxist revolutions "We must allow Nazis free speech lest the same laws that are used against them will be used against the dear old commies," to paraphrase something I heard more than a few times coming out of idiots on the alleged left.  It was particularly stupid coming out of Americans on the left because the whole time they were worried about the free-speech-press "rights" of Nazis, the American equivalent, white supremacy, had a lock on the Senate and ran a number of American states.  The total unrealism of American Marxists, that they had any hope of actually gaining power and putting their brand of Marxism into effect in the face of the reality that if America was ever going to do anything other than egalitarian democracy it would be fascist in character justifies the real American left leaving the Marxists on that scrap heap of history they sometimes talked about.

There is absolutely no reason for people in the Post-WWII period to tolerate anything about Nazis but the truth about their ideology, that it was and is an ongoing danger and it is an absolute moral obligation to suppress it to the fullest extent possible.  It should be countered with the truth but, as can be seen in its resurgence, even the ocean of truth waged against it has not blunted its power to endanger people now.  It must be actively suppressed, online and broadcast and cabloid promotion of it must be stopped.   The same is as true of the lies of the American white supremacists and other genocidal ideologies. 

I've gone over a lot of this before, I suspect I will be going over it again, soon. 

Antisemitism Is A Topic For Adults Of Good Will To Be Disturbed By - Confirm Deborah Lipstadt Now Or Admit Holding Her Up Is An Act Of Antisemitism

THE DESERVEDLY EMINENT HISTORIAN who is most famous for exposing the liar, more than neo-Nazi friendly, famous (formerly lauded) historian David Irving and triumphantly winning when he sued her for libel, Deborah Lipstadt is a victim of Republican-fascists holding up her confirmation for   the U.S. State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.  Or, rather, we are all victims of her nomination being held up.  

The reason she is being blackballed by Republican-fascists is that she has always monitored and combatted antisemitism. 

It was a Republican congressman, Chris Smith of New Jersey, who, in the wake of a series of deadly antisemitic attacks, wrote the law creating the U.S. State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, in 2004. It was Smith who worked to upgrade the office’s special envoy to the rank of ambassador.

But now some of his fellow Republicans are holding up confirmation of Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt, who was nominated by President Joe Biden to serve in that post.

Eminently qualified and highly respected, Lipstadt would seem a shoo-in for the job. She has served two terms on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. She famously won the libel lawsuit brought against her in 2000 in the U.K. by fellow historian David Irving, whom she called a Holocaust denier for, among other things, his specious claim that the Nazis hadn’t gassed Jews.

I have been critical of some of Lipstadt's activities, especially those surrounding the badly thought out effort to come up with a standard definition of that very real and dangerous moral and mental disorder. antisemitism, but holding up her confirmation is such an outrageous an act of Republican-fascist neo-Nazi enablement that it more than overrides any disagreements on the details.

The reason some Senate Republicans are preventing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from scheduling Lipstadt’s confirmation hearing is that she has tweeted criticism of members of their party for various reasons, including her judgment that some had co-opted the Holocaust for political purposes.

In a particularly acerbic comment last spring, she called out Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson for tweeting that he “wasn’t concerned” during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, but would have been concerned had the participants been “Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters.”

“This is white supremacy/nationalism. Pure and simple,” wrote Lipstadt.

She hasn’t been a wallflower with regard to Democrats’ excesses either. In 2019, she charged that some of Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments about Jews’ support for Israel were “textbook anti-Semitism.”

“I am like an umpire,” she told Jewish Insider of her bipartisan slaps. “I call balls and strikes as I see them.”

Most egregiously, though, at least to some Republican members of Congress, she dared to call a foul against then-candidate Donald Trump back in 2016.

She rejected the claims of some that Trump is an antisemite, noting that “This is a man who is exceptionally proud of his daughter, a traditional Jew who is giving her children a solid Jewish education. His son-in-law … is an Orthodox Jew. This is not the profile of an anti-Semite.”

But, she continued, Trump “may be what I call ‘the inadvertent anti-Semite’ — the person who, while not a hater of Jews, has internalized some of the most pernicious stereotypes about Jews.”

Last year, Lipstadt defended a 30-second get-out-the-vote ad from the Jewish Democratic Council of America that juxtaposed imagery from 1930s Germany with footage of neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia; Trump speaking at a rally; and the Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 Jews were massacred in 2018. A shul defaced with graffiti was presented alongside photos of 1930s graffitied Jewish shops.

She explained that she was not comparing the former administration to Nazis. “Had the ad contained imagery of the Shoah,” she said, she would not have defended it. But, she averred, “I would say in the attacks we’re seeing on the press, the courts, academic institutions, elected officials and even, and most chillingly, the electoral process, that this deserves comparison. It’s again showing how the public’s hatred can be whipped up against Jews.” 

I disagree with her over Ilhan Omar's statements which were provocative but not over any line I'd have drawn.  I think Deborah Lipstadt's  and some of her colleagues' attempt to define criticism of Israel's government and SOME of the actions of its supporters here "antisemitism" is wrong and unsustainable.  I am totally opposed to that use of the effort to come up with a supposed standard definition of antisemitism.   

But instead of me disagreeing with her on that leading me to claim she is disqualified, what  she did in all of that was prove her enormous qualification for the position she was nominated for.   No position that important and serious should ever come without the holder stirring things up in a serious and important way.

One of the most tragic features of the popular media presentation of the Shoah, especially in the last decade of the 20th century is that it turned it into something less important for serious work in the future in considering how we are to live now and forever more. It turned it into something you teach for a few days in 4th grade and have children write poems about, not something that is one of the most serious and hard of moral issues that human beings and Western culture have generated.  WHAT IS THAT OFFICE, THAT POSITION SUPPOSED TO BE THERE FOR?  FOR MAKING NICE SPEECHES AT GALLERY OPENINGS AND OPENING PARTIES FOR BROADWAY MUSICALS? 

That her confirmation is being held up because of her comments about current American politics proves that she's got the courage and moral substance for the job that a lesser person would turn into a useless expenditure of public funds. 

Deborah Lipstadt is exactly the right person for that position because such a position should never be quiet and passive and  uncontroversial, they should never, ever be a mere decoration, part of the District of Columbia Cotillion that shows up for reasons of appearances and because "that's nice."   The positions should be to shake the moral conscience of the nation, not for any lesser purpose.

The memory and use of the Shoah has been cheapened by show-biz and Hollywood and popular novels, it has certainly been cheapened by its introduction into the stand-up routines of unfunny comedians.  It is to be expected that with that would come its diminution as effective moral information that makes a difference in the real lives of real people even now as some of the direct witnesses of it are still able to tell us what they saw and experienced.  If someone doesn't do something about that now, things will go even more tragically wrong than they are now. 

Another Sin Of My Old Age - Hate Mail

DOING PROJECTS has proven to be a good way to keep a'goin' here and right now I'm committed to the Louis Boudin project, trying to figure out how to deal with his huge study of judicial attacks on representative democracy.

That's a long way of saying I'm not going to deal with your complaint because it's something I've dealt with over and over again.  Here, for example, from about seven years ago:

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The Bizarre Idea That Mathematical Confirmation of A Religious Teaching Debunks Religion
See an important and exciting Update Below. 

Oh, dear.  Now the atheist boys at Salon are claiming that the recent calculations of game theory, surrounding the "prisoner's dilemma" knock the stuffings out of Jesus.  They claim that the calculations of that branch of mathematics confirms that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you.   Which, since they are so interested in chronological priority,  would seem to be a rather bizarre move in this particular game.   Having read a few things online, I'm not entirely convinced that the simplistic set up of the game and the calculations is really useful to address the teachings of the Jewish tradition, which is not about any artificial set up of such a simplistic scenario but one in which real people are living in the real world with a far fuller range of motivations and interests and in a far richer context of personal and impersonal relationships.  But, for the purpose of the brawl, I'll pretend to entertain the idea.

They make the typical atheist mistake of believing that God couldn't have anything to do with mathematics, that mathematics is, somehow, safe atheist territory where God can't get in.  But, luckily, whoever it was who composed the first line in Genesis blows them out of the water.  If God created the heavens and the Earth, if God is the Creator of of all things visible and invisible, as they say in one version of The Creed, then, of course, you'd expect to find confirmation of something that important if you can work it out mathematically.  While I'd never make that claim, unless forced to, that reluctance would be based in the kind of "tidiness of mind" that Eddington talked about, not any logical or moral objections.

I daresay that most of you are by no means reluctant to accept the scientific epic of the Creation, holding it perhaps as more to the glory of God than the traditional story. Perhaps you would prefer to tone down certain harshnesses of expression, to emphasise the forethought of the Creator in the events which I have called accidents. I would not venture to say that those who are eager to sanctify, as it were, the revelations of science by accepting them as new insight into the divine power are wrong. But this attitude is liable to grate a little on the scientific mind, forcing its free spirit of inquiry into one predetermined mode of expression; and I do not think that the harmonising of the scientific and the religious outlook on experience is assisted that way. Perhaps our feeling on this point can be explained by a comparison . A business man may believe that the hand of Providence is behind his commercial undertakings as it is behind all vicissitudes of his life; but he would be aghast at the suggestion that Providence should be entered as an asset in his balance sheet. I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.
A. S. Eddington: Science and the Unseen World

I am not above pointing out that in this case it would appear to be mathematicians who are mixing math with religion, claiming to have confirmed the logical validity of a moral commandment that human history has shown to be anything but a matter of the most persuasive obviousness.   People, even those who claim to believe that it is a command of God in the Torah (Leviticus 19:18) or of Jesus in the Second Testament, even those people have had the hardest of times living up to this, one of the simplest and yet hardest of teachings.   That it took mathematics up until the very late 20th century to confirm a teaching that extends back into the Jewish tradition in written form many centuries before the Common Era certainly doesn't discredit the insight of the prophets who knew that intuitively.   No more than that it took cosmology until the early 20th century to get to that beginning of Genesis mentioned above, and it was a priest-physicist who came up with that one, too.

And, most ironically of all, it is the atheists who claim that mathematics confirming that most unobvious and difficult of religious teachings, somehow, confirms their debunking of the religious figures who taught that.   I think the untidiness of mind that represents is more than some philosophical maid service could clean up.   Perhaps they would like to address the many atheists of the past two centuries who have denied the truth that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you,  as so many of them have, Nietzche, Haeckel, Rand, ...   Because they are the ones debunked by mathematics if they really have proven the validity of the religious teaching in question.

Update:  It just occurred to me that, now that the atheists are claiming that the truth of that particular commandment has been proven to the level of mathematical certainty, that we can now expect atheists, en masse to begin successfully applying the fruits of reason and science in their own lives.  We can look forward to them proving the superiority of atheist-materialist ideology to that religion which has taught the commandment for thousands of years to such mixed success, though, I would claim, far more success than the denial of its validity would be in reforming the lives of those who heard the words of the Torah, Rabbi Hillel and Jesus.   Now we can see the real test of the atheist devotion to logic, mathematics and reason.

Aren't you just waiting with baited breath to see the atheists acting as if they believed that they should do unto others as they would have done unto them?  I mean, we can look forward to them ditching the double standards favoring atheists that they have always insisted on.   Only, I wouldn't hold your breath TOO long. 

Update: 2022  See the interesting comments made at the time here. 

I will add that re-reading this, it makes me think of such declarations as Richard Dawkins' and other Darwinist fundamentalists who claim, as he infamously put it,  

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

The basic ideology of scientistic, atheistic materialism is that all of reality, all of everything is of one nature, the nature that the material universe has and that every aspect of that must be coherently a part of that one, narrow reality.  If, as the paper claimed that there is a mathematical proof of "The Golden Rule" then, by that ideology the universe has that as one of its attributes and all of reality must be understood to accommodate that reality.   

As I noted in the very thing you object to me saying about the pseudo-sciences of sociology, psychology, science-pretending anthropology and, Lord help us, economics, that you can make the hugest of assumptions that the hugely complex phenomena those pretend to study with science can be studied in that way because all of reality must be susceptible to the methods used to study simple physical phenomena due to the doctrine of that materialist monism.  If that is true any mathematical confirmation of The Golden Rule would mean that that was a scientifically confirmed attribute of physical reality, under your own ideology. If that is true then Darwinian speculation of "the survival of the fittest." what Darwin, himself said was an exact equivalent of "natural selection" is incompatible with that mathematical proof in a matter directly relevant to Darwin's theory. 

As I said at the time, I'm skeptical of all of that but if you're going to bring me something like this I'm able to argue out the logical conclusions based on where you want to fight about it and to point out it doesn't work out the way you want it to.

The Relationship Of Free Speech - Free Press Absolutism And The Rise Of American Fascism Is Directly Proportional Not Inversely Proportional

LAST NIGHT'S discussion on Chris Hayes' show of how FOX and the other American fascist media are getting people they have presented as anti-vaxx-anti-public-health heroes AND MORE AMERICANS A WEEK KILLED THAN ARE KILLED IN A YEAR BY MURDERERS brought things to a point of noting that the FOX anti-vaxx phenomenon is specific to Rupert Murdoch's holdings here and not in other countries.   The discussion noted that Murdoch's holdings in Britain and Australia are not making his media more effective at killing citizens of those countries at levels the most psychotic of Al Qaeda or ISIS terrorists could dream of.  In fact it noted that in Australia there have been legal and, so, financial consequences for some of the American Murdoch crap that has gotten through on the internet. 

The Murdoch family war on Americans is the most serious terrorist attack on the United States in our history,  getting huge numbers of us killed and it is a direct result of the privilege they are given to spew out the lies and propaganda which is the foremost reason that so many of us are dying EVEN AS FOX HERE ENFORCES VACCINE AND TESTING MANDATES FOR THEIR PROPERTIES AND THEIR ON-SCREEN ANTI-VAXXER TERRORISTS WHO ARE ALL VACCINATED AND ARE MANDATING BE PROTECTED FROM WHAT THEY PROMOTE. 

This is a direct consequence of the language of the First Amendment as read by the Warren and subsequent courts, of the ACLU and others in the civil liberties industry getting idiots on the Supreme and lower courts to allow them to carry out a lie campaign that is literally killing hundreds of thousands of Americans as it is deemed that nothing is to be done to stop it "because of the First Amendment."

This is not sustainable, what it is is an indictment of the entire theory of "free speech- free press" when the press is mass media and which we know will function with complete irresponsibility and malignity if they think they and their owners can gain power and get money through it. 

Jefferson's declaration that he would rather have newspapers than governments was one of the stupidest things he ever said, knowing full well that he would never have to live without a government.  It is a slogan of stunning dishonesty and stupidity because he could never imagine what the world he declared his preference for would be like AND BECAUSE HE COULD NEVER IMAGINE MASS MEDIA OF SUCH AMORAL MALIGNITY AS THAT WHICH THE 20TH CENTURY SAW RISE AND BECOME A REALITY UNCOVERED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT.  

We have learned nothing from this yet but I don't think we will be able to put off the lesson of this forever.  It has the very real and likely possibility of having even worse effects than the one we are seeing right now, every week.   In the United States, elsewhere, the electronic mass media is proving to be the fascists' best friend, their dependable tool, the thing that is destroying equality and democracy around the world.  Jefferson was wrong about that.  Our media will certainly not be the thing that admits to it, not even the most responsible of them.  But I will, I'm not a journalist, I'm not a lawyer but I can see what's happening right in front of us and has been steadily getting worse since 1964 because of that folly.

The Return of Monday Night Standards - Cole Porter - Get Out Of Town

 

Direct link to video 

Peggy Lee - voice
George Shearing - piano
Ray Alexander – vibraphone
Toots Thielemans – guitar
Jimmy Bond – double bass
Roy Haynes – drums
Armando Peraza – conga

It's always tempting to post the always fine and virtually inevitable Ella Fitzgerald interpretation of the standard, standards but in this case I think Peggy Lee's lighter, more humorous, less empassioned treatment of it is better.   

So far as I can find out, the incredible Roy Haynes is still with us, if he is in early March, I wonder if he'll play on his birthday as I've read he has been up till Covid stopped him.  An incredible artist with an incredible career.

Update before posting:  I just got a call that I've got to go out so I'm posting this prematurely. 

As The Carbuncle Abcesses

The Dred Scott decision is the very foundation of our constitutional system as it exists today. Popular belief and professional opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, Taney, not Marshall, is the Father of the Judicial Power. And itsfoundations were laid not in Marbury v. Madison (1803) but in Dred Scott v.Sandford (1857). Marshall was at most a pretender to the throne, while Taney established a real kingdom. But even Marshall’s pretensions did not extend to the vast domain which Taney actually conquered. In Marbury v. Madison Marshall put forward the comparatively modest claim that in passing upon the right of Mr. Marbury to be Justice of the Peace of the District of Columbia during the next few years, the judges had the right to compare the law of Congress with the Constitution on the question of power of the Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus, and, if they found that the law of Congress was not in accordance with what they believed to be the provisions of the Constitution, to disregard the law of Congress. But in the Dred Scott Case, Taney and his associates undertook, in the language of Mr. Justice Wayne, to settle by judicial decision the peace and harmony of the country.  

Louis Boudin

I am mindful that going through all of the excellent points that are made in the massive book Government By Judiciary would not be feasible and am thinking of cutting to the chase and going after what he, himself, said was the most consequential information in it, that even with the dangerousness of the self-creation by the court of its power to overturn legislation that it didn't really start to become the danger it is now until the most infamous of 19th century decisions, the Dred Scott decision  which went far, far beyond what Marshall and his colleagues had done.   He points out that though, through the terrible Civil War overturned the effects of the Dred Scott case, cementing slavery into place THE IDIOTS OF THE SUPREME COURT BELIEVING, THEREBY, IN 1857 THAT THEY HAD ENSURED THE PEACE AND TRANQUILITY OF THE NATION, the powers that those slave enabling "justices" created for the Court in that case persisted and has grown steadily worse.

This paper, Government By A Few Conservative Men is worth reading as one person's condensation of Boudin's arguments though its extension asserting that William Rehnquist was thinking along the same lines in his claims about the dangers of judicial power were pretty much negated in his actions on the court.  Lip service about judicial restraint by that white supremacist, voter intimidating enemy of one-person-one-vote, each of those votes being counted and made potent in reality is belied by his record.  Not to mention his style on the bench.  But it is worth reading for what it pulls out of the book and some of the points made.  

If anyone would have any preferences in how I should proceed I will take that into account.  The best thing, of course, would be for you to read the book but it's not easy to find and even less easy to get through, the evidence presented is as massive as it is strong.

I will note that one solution to the problem of the run amok Supreme Court we have now is to stop allowing a mere majority short of a unanimous court to negate duly made laws, leaving it to the far more reliable remedy of the Voters taking care of legislative excesses.  As anyone can see we went from the modesty of the Marbury decision through the Dred Scott one - proof that the wise men of the court can be stunningly stupid as they tat together a string of words to justify them doing what they want to - to today when an emboldened Supreme Court will even overturn elections on a partisan basis, with "justices" such as Sandra Day O'Connor joining Rehnquist and others of her party for a Republican who lost the popular election explicitly so that he will replace her instead of a Democrat.   She, of course, suffered nothing as the Supreme Court members never are on their on the basis of total impunity.  

Addressing these are dangers is something that we can't put off eternally because, like in 1857, the issues involved are coming to all kinds of heads and the carbuncle is dangerously abscessed right now.

Functional Racism Is More Important Than If The Racist Really Feels The Hate They Promote As A Political Weapon

SOMEONE ASKED ME if Susan Collins is a racist for her remarks joining in with the Republican-fascist attempt to turn the as yet unnamed Black Woman who Joe Biden will nominate to the Supreme Court into Republican-fascist racist ammunition to attack President Biden.  The fact that the Black Woman who will be nominated is as of now unnamed and who can be judged on no other basis than her race and gender  turns everything said against her into an act of prejudice, one which is certainly due to both her race, so an act of racism. 

The Republican Party from the 1950s has fully embraced racism and ethnic hatred as a means of winning politically.   In 2022 there is no Republican who is not, continually, guilty of hoping to benefit from that and expecting to, no matter what they bleat out as their "real" feelings.   The Republican Party is a party fully and totally wedded to the traditional American form of fascism, white supremacy.  A lot of them sound like white racists of the 19th century, sometimes exactly like them.

I don't really care what's in sleazy Susan's shrunken little heart-of-hearts and don't think that's important, what's important is what the liar, hypocrite and opportunist does and her actions can be counted on to be as racist as she calculates is in her self-interest to be at any given point.

After seeing how she and the rest of the Republican fascists and their allies with "D" after their name can go from one position, one stated position, one actual position in total contradiction to what they did or said before depending on what their momentary self-interest is, what difference does it matter if she feels the racism she is using to get what she wants.

I will note that other than a few people from New York I've met, the most racist college-graduates I've ever encountered in my life came from the same area of Maine Collins is from, one of the most shocking of those who openly declared her hatred of Black People, not now in the resurgent racism in our age of free-speech-press absolutism, not the milieu of kew-el anti-PC transgression but in the milieu of college credentialed people of New England the 1970s was from the same town as Susan Collins, Caribou.  I can't say that having met the like of them has not had an influence of my view of Northern Maine and, specifically, Caribou.   I will acknowledge that I may hold something of a prejudice due to that even as I would hope it would not prejudice me in actions in any specific case.  

The technical jargon and the dry rot of legal learning tend to disappear; and, instead, there stand revealed before the reader human beings—usually very interesting human beings—with their hopes, aspirations, desires, and foibles.

OVERLAPPING A PARAGRAPH from where I left off with Government by Judiciary, Louis Boudin tells us his method of trying to break through the intentionally and habitually opaque and, so, deceptive judicial and legal verbiage that most people get distorted and lied about in entertainment media and so have a dangerously wrong view of what the Supreme Court and other courts regularly get up to in order to thwart egalitarian democracy and, so, the common good.

How get behind the published opinions? Or, rather, behind their verbiage, to their real meaning? My solution of the problem was the application of the comparative-historical method. While a judge may, consciously or unconsciously, hide his real meaning as well as his motives behind a barrage of words, both his meaning and his motives become perfectly plain when looked at in the light of similar words uttered by other judges at other times in the course of our judicial history. My task was, therefore, nothing less than that of writing a constitutional history of this country—at least in outline—and of writing it, as far as possible, in the language
of the actors who made it, the judges themselves.

As a preliminary, it was necessary to clear the ground of some mythical and legendary history—by writing some chapters on what might be called the pre-natal history of the Constitution. In doing this part of the work some special studies had to be undertaken into fields into which I could not expect the general reader to follow
me. The result of these studies were taken for granted in the main text, while the proof of these assumptions was relegated into appendices, where the special student may find them, while those willing to take my conclusions on trust may skip them. The principal portion of Appendix A was published as an article in the Law Review for March, 1929, under the title Lord Coke and the American Doctrine of Judicial Power, Appendix B—with some modifications—was published as an article in St. John’s Law Review for May, 1929, under the title Precedents for the Judicial Power.

[As luck would have it, the text of that article is available online without a pay-wall, for once.]

But while I was willing to be taken on trust by some of my readers as to some of my assertions with regard to the pre-natal history of our Constitution, I -was unwilling to do so with regard to any part of our history under the Constitution. I have, therefore, not followed the usual method of putting the proof into footnotes. To me “the proof is the thing” so I stuck the long quotations from judicial decisions right into the text, where the reader will have to read them, if he is to read the book at all. This may deter some readers from continuing their reading, but those who read to the end will have to take nothing on trust. Incidentally, I believe that these quotations are worth reading on their own account—for much of the tragedy and comedy of our history lies hidden in them. And as one goes along the reading becomes of absorbing interest. The technical jargon and the dry rot of legal learning tend to disappear; and, instead, there stand revealed before the reader human beings—usually very interesting human beings—with their hopes, aspirations, desires, and foibles. Behind the impassive judicial masks we see impassioned actors making history, and history in the making.

New York, August 1931

Not only the technical jargon and dry rot but also the deception of those, the very stuff of how the Supreme Court has regularly thwarted the "hopes, aspirations, desires" and so unequally and so outrageously punished and, or corrected the "foibles" of human beings.  As I pointed out the other day, the system which we were all lied into believing is as it absolutely is not exists as it really does BECAUSE OF WHO BENEFITS FROM IT AND THEIR "HOPES ASPIRATIONS AND DESIRES" ARE AGAINST AND NOT FOR THE COMMON GOOD.  

It is largely due to the Supreme Court and the tragically vague, inspecific language of even the least bad parts of the Constitution that we, in 2022 are seriously in danger of recapitulating all of the worst in our history having learned nothing from it and, as can be seen in the Republican-fascist attempt to lie us into a white supremacist national mythology on the basis of "freedom" to repeat it in a concentrated form, the posterity of the abolitionists, the Women's suffrage, workers rights, etc. now experiencing the same oppression that was reserved for Black People, Native People and other People of Color for the entire period under a combination of  Supreme Court and the Senate [even more so than the House] establishment and maintenance of white supremacist-oligarchic rule. 

As I noted I have found little actual biographical information about Louis Boudin, one of the things I did find out is that he came here with his family from Russia when he was 17, I doubt knowing a lot of English at that age but who quickly gained not only sufficient language skills to get a university education but to go through law school and to think so well in a second language as to write what he did.  Considering he was Jewish, a minority discriminated against but never so much as those who were not white, especially discriminated against in the professions, his achievements are impressive.  Most impressive for me is how his reason and fundamental dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence kept him from some of the worst of the left he was a part of - he apparently saw through the tragedy of the Russian Revolution very fast - and of the legal establishment he was a member of, as well.   I think there isn't nearly enough said about how some of the greatest proponents of the principles of American democracy in the Declaration of Independence were immigrants or the children of immigrants even as the established older families and populations either despised democracy or took it dangerously for granted and got sold cheap, knock-off substitutes and symbols divorced from any reality behind them.  Not a little of that delivered in popular entertainment, much of it under the direct influence of those who favored racist inequality, often on a regional basis, later expanded on the basis of shared white supremacy even in those states which maintained the Union side in the Civil War. 

A lot of that on no more of a basis than that those in Hollywood and on Broadway wanted to be able to sell their crap to audiences of racists, especially in the former Confederate states.   Hollywood is especially guilty in that regard, though these days "Hollywood" isn't merely a city in California.  You don't have to be very old to remember PBS children's programming being altered for or under pressure from their affiliates in formerly Confederate States even as the public schools are from Republican fascists.    We are seeing what I was calling "fascist chic"  in the late 1970s and 1980s, movies and TV and "anti-political correctness" racism as edgy humor bearing the fruit that anyone less stupid than a Supreme Court member should have seen coming.  I doubt that if even earlier the Confederate flag hadn't been used in movies so regularly, such things as Iron Crosses, those would show up so regularly in today's mainstream politics.  I heard that the truckers' anti-vaxx astro-turf in Canada such symbols were used there.  They certainly didn't get it from their own history, it's due to American movies. 

Junk Science In The Reputable Media And Universities

I USED TO LISTEN to the CBC radio science program Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald regularly but not so much these days.   Having access to text that can be read faster than listening to the radio and that can be reviewed on the screen or page, that's how I prefer to get science news, these days. 

This week I notice that on the show there is exactly the kind of pseudo-scientific science I have mentioned the last few days, brought by a prominent, credentialed, scientist from as eminent a university as Cambridge.   The interview is symptomatic of the kind of decadence within modern science that will be promoted in the media.  

The topic is the entirely non-scientific "study" of extra-terrestrial life.  The interview starts out badly.

- Zoology and the study of extraterrestrial life may seem like two different subjects at first glance. What inspired you to write a book that combines the study of both?

- Well, the study of zoology, or the way that we zoologists pursue our science, is always about asking "why" questions. Asking why animals are the way they are, why they look the way they do, why they behave the way they do. And the answer to all of these "why" questions always come down to evolution, to the different ways that evolutionary forces are acting on these animals.

So it's really not that big a stretch to see that the evolutionary forces that we understand from studying animals all this time on Earth, those same forces are universal. Those are the kinds of things that will make animals on Earth eat each other. They'll make creatures on other planets eat each other because the fundamental laws are still the same.

It's a lie that it isn't a big stretch.  It is a stretch past the breaking point to say it and pretend you're doing science.  And an even bigger one to get away with it on a popular science show.

Exactly how this scientist knows that "those same forces are universal" is something that is never asked.  Of course, until they have a large number of samples of "other life" to study, there is no way for them to know that that huge leap of faith is supported by scientific observation and measurement, the analysis of which could possibly show that that assumption is wrong.  The fact is there is not the first such example available for study, never mind every single other example of "other life" in the universe, what would be necessary to be able to study to sustain the claim that those are universal.  I will repeat that I'm skeptical that scientists know what those are here, now, today or if their ideological speculations are anything like a universal explanation of how life on Earth arose and developed in its diversity.   I doubt that science today has any general idea of what range of mechanisms might have resulted in what we have now.  What it has is dogmatic certitude based on ideology.

The culture of zoology and, in fact, all of Darwinian biology, is predisposed to make exactly that assumption because the theory of natural selection is one such huge leap of faith which is not based in observation or actual measurement of the thing claimed to be explained by it.  As can be seen, unwarranted speculation about what can be known to be there will make the huge leap into speculation about what cannot be seen and likely, for the rest of the life of the Earth, will not be known to be there.  How this is more scientific than angelology as science is something I'd really like to ask Bob McDonald or Arik Kirschenbaum.   Only no one is going to pretend that we can assume angels are anything like us on anything like a scientific basis.

I wouldn't claim to have any basis for saying that that speculation is wrong because I have no more access to "other life" than the entirety of scientists who pretend they can know that. 

It gets worse as the Cambridge zoologist proves that every single thing he says about this is based on not only what is scientifically knowable about life here but in a huge range of merely assumed speculations that are rampant in biology for ideological reasons and the self-interested assertions of scientists holding onto this or that ideological stand. 

Q. - Carl Sagan believed in life and other planets and that they indeed would have similar characteristics to life here on Earth. But we're now learning that planets, even those within our own solar system, are really, really different from Earth. So how can it be both ways? How can alien life be similar to ours on such different worlds?

A. - The interesting thing here is that the evolution and the process of evolution and the rules by which evolution works are pretty much independent of the underlying biology. They're pretty much independent of the biochemistry. They're independent of exactly what kind of metabolism or what kind of chemicals are being used.

I will break in here to say I doubt very highly that evolution is independent of the underlying biology, I would really love to have someone try to produce a logically coherent argument that that is true, that the processes of evolution can in any way be independent of the underlying biology.   The conventional Darwinism expressed in the interview is not separable from the underlying biology of the organisms in question.   HOW THEY COULD SEPARATE THE TWO TO TEST SUCH AN HYPOTHESIS ON THE BASIS OF CURRENT KNOWLEDGE WOULD BE A USEFUL CLAIM TO HAVE ON PAPER IN FRONT OF YOU.  I think this might count as the stupidest thing I have read or heard an allegedly reputable scientist claim in a long time. 

You don't need DNA for evolution. OK, there's lots of different ways that evolution could work with different kinds of chemicals, different kinds of chemistries. 

Until you have actual organisms either without DNA or which, at no point in their lives or the history of their lineage, had no knowable connection to DNA that speculation is of unknowable truth.   I say that when it is one of my speculations that DNA and RNA both evolved in the ancient organisms that precede any resolvable fossil evidence with evidence of those molecules being present, though that is only based on the extremely complex structures and status of both of those molecules and the supporting cellular chemistry that they work in.  But that is a speculation because there is no physical evidence to use to support that as being how things actually happened.   Remember that idea, that how life happened to arise on Earth is not through some unsupported speculation BUT IN THE ONLY WAY THAT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, SOMETHING WHICH IS PROBABLY LOST IN THE EROSION, THE DECAY AND THE BURIAL OF THE PAST NEVER TO BE RECOVERED.

You could have animals based on DNA like ours. You could have creatures that are based on a different chemical that transmits information from one generation to the next. You could have animals that don't rely on water, perhaps even some other solvent they could use. But still, the evolutionary processes are still going to be the same, survival of the fittest.

That is absolutely ridiculous to claim on the basis of having absolutely nothing to base it on, no other example of "other life" which may or may not support that Darwinian supposition.   This is a good example of that ultimate "Just-so story" method of doing evolutionary science without even the sky as a limit.  

This is not scientific except that science is whatever scientists get away with calling science and when they do that from elite university positions and reputable science journalists let them get away with it the way Bob McDonald did here, there is nothing they can't claim. 

If the role of a science reporter isn't to question what is said in a case like this, what is the use of having one?   

This interview is an example of stunning factual, logical and philosophical incompetence and of basic journalistic integrity.  I have not come to expect any of those when things like this are discussed as science.