Hate Mail

 Every man who works with words for effects is a literary worker.

The Ordinaire Style Of Psych-Soc, Neuro-Cog Whines

WHEN I WAS starting out with online commentary one of the things that really upset a lot of the college-credentialed blog-rats such as I was becoming was when I expressed my lack of faith in the scientific nature of surveying and polling.  If anything my skepticism of that has only grown, the way that I know my skepticism of c. 2004 wasn't complete.  

My reason for that skepticism was based in the necessity of relying on the reported thinking, experience, past actions, etc. of those who the alleged researcher could not:

1. Ascertain if the person giving them a response was telling them the truth.
 

2. Ascertain that if the person giving them a response was giving them an accurate answer or an inaccurate one which they believed to be true.
 

3. Ascertain that the same person would give them the same response two minutes, two days, . . . two years after the researcher recorded it as a datum and asserted it stood as a valid piece of the reliability of what their eventual number crunching claimed to produce and credulous idiots depended on it as durable truth.
 

4. Had no ability to verify that their sample was actually representative of the range of what every part of the population would give them if they could include them in their polling.
 

5. That such researchers NEVER or virtually never actually had a sufficiently large sample of the population they claimed to be studying.
 

6. That they never could have a valid random sample of a larger population because 

a. They could not previously know enough about the larger population to define what a random sample of it would  be.
b. Such a sample would consist of entirely voluntary respondents who one thing can be safely guessed at, they will not be representative of the part of the population which would not participate in such a poll or survey.  It is as impossible to survey or poll those who would be unwilling to respond to a survey as it would be to discern which of those who would respond would be determined liars who knowingly misrepresented themselves.   The character of that hostile non-sample cannot be discerned with the very methods being rejected.

And that's only a bit of what I objected to in the pseudo-science of surveying and polling which have always seemed to me to be questionably motivated to start with, those who commission and pay for the survey wanting either an obvious result or one which the so-called scientist on the make could give them and, so, perhaps be hired again to give them another pleasing result.  It's all a friggin' racket, not science.

The problems of surveying and polling listed, and many others I could raise, are endemic to all of the so-called, social sciences, those which rely on the self-reporting of the internal minds of human beings, even more so those in which the self-interested, far from objectively pure so-called scientists replace their own reporting of "behavior" for the self-reporting of animals who, one thing is certain, are not humans and so no human can rationally be expected to understand to the point where such reporting is more than a wild guess or a bit of folk-lore.

That entire schools at modern universities are dedicated to such stuff and they have enormous prestige and power and command enormous credulity doesn't do a thing to erase the problems of it when characterized as "science."  It shares little to nothing with the study of physical objects and their movements, chemicals, their elemental forms and combinations into molecules, etc.  Medieval universities are often mocked, quite often in modern, false caricature, for the absurdities studied and written in them.  Some of which, such as Ptolemaic  astronomy, was actually based in direct observation and measurement and made accurate predictions at a level which far surpasses the ability of everything from allegedly scientific anthropology and ethology up to and including today's most fashionable "neuro" and "cognitive" sciences to do with the objects of their alleged study.  

 That they were wrong about the location of the Earth as compared to the sun, planets, etc. didn't make their actual scientific method any less an act of science, up to the point where better models which had more predictive and explanatory powers superseded them.  And, contrary to the nearly universally held modern myth about that, the real enemies of the sun-centered model were the scientific establishment, not the Church. It was they who Galileo, a Catholic believer, wrote to Kepler, a Protestant believer, complaining they wouldn't even look into his telescope, not a Cardinal who was already dead by the time of his trial.  TIME LINES, PEOPLE!  Copernicus was encouraged to publish his findings by bishops and popes, he dedicated his great book to the then reigning Pope.  Galileo ran afoul of the last humanist Pope because by making fun of him, he challenged his earthly power.  It was entirely about political and economic power, it had nothing to do with science or legitimate religious belief.  I've written about that at length, look at my archive.  

I don't have anything to lose or gain by mocking pseudo-science of that kind, the people who pay me aren't interested if I am a heretic of the kind I am.  You can't touch me.  And I don't care if you say I have cooties.

Modern pseudo-science is less scientific than late medieval discredited-science.  As I pointed out here the other day, secular fundamentalism, especially as enforced by the courts, the Roberts Court being about the worst since Taney, is far worse than much of religious fundamentalism.  
   
   

Molochite America - Another Murder At Another School

AMERICA IS NOT A CHRISTIAN NATION, it couldn't be and retain the easy accessibility to guns and other weapons of mass murderous destruction and witness the child-sacrifice to the Constitution, the Supreme Court pagan-priesthood and the gun-industry (all for the benefit of America's fascists who will use those to destroy democracy, as the Republican-fascists are encouraging). 

We are worse than the child-sacrificing cults because we lie about what's going on.  We lie to the extent THAT MASS MURDERS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS ARE ROUTINE IN A WAY THAT CHILD SACRIFICE IN THE MOST DEPRAVED OF OLD PAGAN CULTURES WAS EXCEPTIONAL.

And it's due to the cult of the "founders" the "Constitution" and "The Bill of Rights."

We will continue to sacrifice children to all of those because the gods of secularism, instrumental reasoning and materialist depravity are more bloodthirsty than even the most depraved of ancient death cults allowed themselves to imagine.   

Will we save ourselves, our children?   There's no evidence that will happen as long as those cults require us to not face reality and what really caused this to happen.  As I pointed out about our perverted, twisted, denaturing and perverting of the idea of "rights" if all that Second Amendment shit was an expression of real rights, these effects would not be what they are.  

"Christianity" like "rights" is a word which has been totally perverted under the media-corporate-oligarchic astro-turf replacement of honest thinking and honest courage.  The two perversions of positive things is intimately related. 

Modernism, itself, is rightly seen as the cause of this because it has made us ever stupider than we should be.  You need to believe that something matters in the end, that there is a moral foundation that is absolute or you let it all go to hell.  Modernism refuses to admit that.

Update:  Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, ALL OF THEM HAVE THE BLOOD OF THOSE CHILDREN ON THEIR CLEAN, WELL MANICURED HANDS, THEIR JUDICIAL DRAG REEKS OF IT.  The stink of this is on all of them, their fellow judges, the corpses of others gone to their accounting, the lawyers who enable the gun lobby and nuts - including the pseudo-liberals of the "civil liberties" industry.  The Republican-fascists in the Senate, such Democrats as who have done the bidding of the gun industry, the media liars who support all of it.   That is our priesthood of mass child murder-sacrifice. 

Atheist Say The Darndest Things - Two Response

PERHAPS I SHOULD ALWAYS make a point of pointing out that I don't believe human beings are ever going to have a total and absolute knowledge of even the basic aspects of physical existence as a crudely abstract generalization whenever I bring up religion because religion is harder than physics and cosmology.*  We will have no final answer on those questions, not in this life, maybe in the next one. Honest religion doesn't pretend we can.  The crude assumption that I believe that the Roman Catholic Church does or ever did is based in a false and absurd stereotype that even most old-line Catholics outside of the most rigid hierarchs would have claimed to believe.

I have mocked the pretense of materialist-atheist-scientistic cosmologists and physicists that they are on the verge of their El Dorado, their (un)Holy Grail, THE Theory of Everything when one of their greatest discoveries in the 20th century was exactly that they will never have anything like complete needed knowledge of even one tiny particle in physical existence.  Their claim is, on the basis of far sounder physics than they make recourse to, a philosophical absurdity.  It's even more absurd when you treat it with common sense, which such pretensions don't even surpass.  To believe otherwise you'd have to pretend that one of the major accomplishments of their science wasn't valid, which would call the rest of it into reasonable question.

I value good science a lot more highly, apparently.

And I have pointed out the limits of even what real methodologically sound as opposed to academically crowned (pseudo-)science does or likely will ever know about even human minds and their expressions in the world of behavior and socieities so many times that maybe I just assumed people would make the connection between that decisive admission of the modesty of the knowledge of each and every one of us and the even more obvious assumptions that when it's a question of God the Creator, The Redeemer and the Sanctifier, we are at infinitely more of a loss to have a complete and comprehensive knowledge, complete understanding, more than merely adequate application of that knowledge and understanding, emotional response and volitional inclinations to act and be from that. Jewish descended monotheism is intimately concerned with all of it because it addresses the lives of the human species in which none of that, the social, the individual, the mental, the physical, the cosmological, and other aspects which we have not even named are vitally relevant to it.  Religion can't do what even real science does, radically segregate its field of interest to some of the simplest aspects of observable, measurable, analyzable physical phenomena which can honestly be treated with scientific method.  

Perhaps that has something to do with both the reported polling of those in the social-"sciences," psychology, etc. as being not only most likely to be atheists but, in my observation, among the most hostile to religion because they pretend they can do with scientific method what religion attempts outside of it but, it being impossible to treat such questions with real scientific method, rigorously applied, they so notably fail so they take it out on their, at times, more successful rivals.  I did find it rather funny that the old-time 'ligion of materialist-atheist-scientism as found in CSICOP (now CFI) was full of pseudo-scientists from that field who had no problem spouting some of the worst pseudo-science published in academic journals as they feverishly and successfully tried to shut down far more rigorous and modest science that violated their ideological faith.

I never claimed that any one understanding of these things is going to be THE correct one.  The old Catholic claims in that regard, that the Catholic Church (meaning the Roman Catholich church) being THE ONE and complete source of something like that was never something I believed in.  I never believed it and that was before I understood that it was an absurdity on the level of atheist cosmologists claiming they had the equivalent in their materialistic pretensions. It might be an interesting topic to pursue, the similarities between post-WWII materialist-atheist-scientism and the most rabidly annoying old-line Cathoic-Integralist liars because, thinking about your comment, I think I'd be able to find quit a list of those, leaving it to someone raised in Protestantism to find an equivalent list with the like in modern fundamentalism.

The accusation that I share in that annoying ancient political claim of Catholicism because I was raised a Catholic is baseless. I found it annoying myself and stifling and untrue based on Scripture and the history of the Catholic Church and the achievements of those outside of Catholicism and even Christianity in regard to sanctity and goodness.  Vatican II happened sixty years ago, get with the times.

Nah, I'm as mystified as anyone as to those biggest and ultimate matters in this regard.  I explore a little around the Scriptures because the deeper you get into those the more impressive they are for containing some very sophisticated and extraordinary insights into these things and are large enough to contain opposite and contending views of them.   The next passage from where I left off in Luke Timothy Johnson's The Real Jesus, for example. Which I hope to get to soon.

I have always admitted that my wasted youth and middle-age ill-prepared me for it. Since when did that prevent someone writing about something and posting it online?

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I've never trusted Republicans. Not since I found out that there were Republicans when my Eleanor Roosevelt Democratic news junkie Mother introduced me to politics by osmosis.

Coming up with that title above will, certainly, mystify anyone much younger than I am because it references that corporate radio, then TV creepy guy, Art Linkletter who, believe it or not, provided one of my earliest clues into the depth of Hollywood-Republican, now Republican-fascist active collusion in the mid-1960s.  I've had a really bad spring so far and it's not getting much better, thus the continuing days with no posts.  I hate it when I can't research stuff enough to feel confident in what I post and don't want to repeat myself TOO much.  As I recall Linkletter's parents were evangelical preachers, which certainly links into what I've said.

Maybe if things calm down here I'll get to researching that for a post or two.  

As to the mystification of the even, now, middle-aged about who this Art Linkletter guy was, I'm glad that they don't know it.  Nothing becomes more quickly useless and not worth knowing as pop-kulcha because it started out that way.  Only the malignant aspects of it have durability in their effects.  That's the only thing that is important about it, commercial pop-kulcha is a study in depravity as is the study of so much of alleged high-brow stuff.  The academic explosion in writing absurd papers and books about it is an epic in the decadence of contemporary universities and their disgusting requirements of publishing any old shit to advance or even keep a job.  They used to stress actual teaching but pop-kulcha addled students couldn't handle a really rigorous educational experience and instead of making up for that, they just pretend what they're doing is what academia is supposed to do.

Matthew 25: 31-46, that matters, that lasts. It will matter to lots of other People just as pop-kulcha doesn't even matter to those who work in it.  The "kulcha" of it, the money is everything in it.  It's got a lot in common with the industry in disposable paper products, since my trolls bring up "pulp."  

To polish off another piece of hate-mail along with the one that gave me the first part of this. 

*  I minored in math and majored in music.  Advanced math was hard, Beethoven and Schoenberg were a hell of a lot harder.

LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE 

Another Important Commentary From RMJ

THE ALWAYS WORTH READING RMJ wrote a critique of the passages from Luke Timothy Johnson that comes to some conclusions different from mine.   Certainly there are many such critiques that could be written and read for a good reason.  

Somewhere in my computer there's a piece I started pointing out that we don't even read the same stories on the same page of the same Gospel the same way Matthew 25:31-46, one of the passages I constantly come back to and Matthew 25:14-30, which, perhaps due to it concerning the investment of money,  has always left me somewhat cold.   And I never think of 31-46 in terms of "The Judgement Of The Nations" but the consequential commandment to do to the least among us what we would do to God.  

I'm not at all upset or concerned or annoyed that there are such radically different readings of Scripture or even the assumptions we base our readings on - even the same person reading the same Book will inevitably vary all of the factors in their reading, even the same passages at different times.  There are many things to be learned from reading those I wouldn't agree with and from having to think about those, sometimes coming to agree with them.  I think I mentioned that when I first read Johnson's book I didn't like it because I was still under the influence of John Dominic Crossan.  

I knew that Luke Timothy Johnson, and especially that non-scholarly critique of  other such popular and semi-popular books of a quarter of a century ago (how time flies!) would be an invitation for disagreement.  Much of what Johnson said and which I've typed out to post I don't know what I think of it in a developed way.   I certainly don't either disagree with everything John Dominic Crossan says - I've written positive things about him and, now, some negative things - and I would say the same about Johnson.  The series is opening things up, such as the questioning of the historical-critical method, even what we think of as the authority of history as determining essence of Christianity.  It should be clear that my thinking on that is preliminary,  I have admitted that I am so stuck in the general habit of thinking about that that having the possibility that there are other ways to think of it is really mind blowing.  

I will point out again that the book I've been excerpting, The Real Jesus isn't a book of Johnson's scholarship, I'm just beginning to look into that - wishing I could find an affordable used copy of his enormous first book on Paul.   His take on things is not the same as Walter Brueggemann's though both of them have been critical of the Jesus Seminar and J.D. Crossan.   Brueggemann's critique had a far stronger effect on me.

An irony that might have been pointed out in this is my admission that Hans Kung has had a huge influence on me when one of his defenses against his Vatican and hierarchical enemies was that he was looking at what the New Testament said as opposed to medieval theology to find what was authentic.  Certainly his view of authenticity is far different from others who claim the sole authority of Scripture.

An Anniversary With Blood And Nightmares A Week Before A Big Drinking Holiday Weekend

ONE OF THE ALCOHOLIC ANNIVERSARIES in my family is approaching, we have more than one, memories of a really ghastly day, not one of the death days, but the kind you remember against your will and can see best with your eyes closed. And you wish you couldn't.  The too real denouement of the reality of how drinking is falsely depicted in fiction, on stage and on screen.  When I watched a video of Falstaff being played last year, the first time I'd watched one of the plays featuring him since the death of my first alcoholic brother, I found nothing in it that was amusing or charming or endearing.  If there's one thing that will never be the same, its how you see dramatic, cinematic depictions of comic drunks after seeing something like that not depicted but entirely real, at the closing.  It's such a cheap, predictable and predictably cheap theatrical device that even the best writers use.  That doesn't make it any less a detestable lie.

This year the remembrance includes the recently gained knowledge that three of the next generation of my family are following that family propensity, ages 26 to 31, possibly others who I haven't been told about.  Apparently the younger generation thinks they're being kind by shielding me from such stuff till it can't be hidden.  I said it was a "family propensity" when it's one of the most common addictions in the human species.  I doubt there are many families untouched by it.

I took care of all three when they were children - the gay uncle with no family of his own was regularly seen as a free baby-sitting service.  I would bet you that lots of LGBTQ people have done that service to the world without much acknowledgement.

To see those who I knew as once happy children so destructively addicted to alcohol, their terrible unhappiness, that of their loved ones, knowing the likely end of that in maybe twenty or thirty years, if not far sooner, knowing that one of the common alternatives is a car crash that gets them or others killed can really make you think.  And, alcohol being what it is and how it's commonly used, you certainly don't have to be an alcoholic to get that kind of result.  And that's only one kind of accident that alcohol use frequently leads to.

Or to get beaten up by a drunk or attacked by one or attacked and raped or robbed while being drunk, maybe by some piece of slime who stays sober the better to take advantage.  Being drunk is being a volunteer to take a chance at being attacked and taken advantage of.  Drunks make themselves targets, it doesn't matter how much you whine about "blaming the victim," such victims are self-made AND THEM BEING VICTIMS MADE THUS ARE ALL THAT REALLY MATTERS, NO MATTER WHO YOU "BLAME."  I'm not a court, I'm not a lawyer trying to prejudice a jury, my "blaming" would have no effect, my not mentioning it can have an effect.  If I kept silent about that all it would make me is an enabler of those who prey on them. Those who cry "you're blaming the victim" IN FACT ARE SUCH ENABLERS.  It's a slogan of enablement of the scenario leading to the victimization.

Which leads to another important unconsidered consideration of the language involved in this. I didn't rob them, especially Women, of their "rights" to get drunk like a man, as they are idiotically considered to have a "right" to do so.  In fact, such a "right" is no right at all, it is the voluntary self-obliteration of rights.

The idea that there is a "right" involved in getting drunk is to have the stupidest and shallowest of ideas about what "rights" are and why having them is important.  In the idiotic side of "rights" babble of the late 20th and early 21st century, those parts of it are never really considered.  It is to mistake the equivalent legalized ability to make yourself an idiot and fool or a victim such as described as being "rights" is one of those addle-minded follies of modern life.  Rights are notable for being positive in their effects on those who can exercise them, producing wellness, soundness, safety, durable happiness, an enhancement to life and personal well being.  Drinking does none of that, no matter what the liquor and wine industry have paid people in the nutrition racket to announce as their paid-for "findings."  The strictly sober are the ones who, as a group, demonstrably enjoy longer life and fewer health problems.  More well-being.

Drunks and the near intoxicated surrender their ability to exercise their real rights by putting themselves in that position. How can getting drunk be a "right" anymore than getting slipped a date rape drug is, since they both have the same results?  Both are a loss of the right to think clearly and keeping yourself safe. Voluntarily or involuntarily, the results are the same.  That's a fact even if I repeated the current slogans surrounding that like an idiot computer parrot bot.  

Reality is real, slogans are made for beer coasters.  

I say that thinking about one of my nieces who I've recently discovered is often to be found sitting alone in bars while very drunk and very vulnerable where no one is around to help her. Not her family which has no "right" to intervene, the courts would certainly prevent any family from doing that.  Certainly not a single champion of such "rights" demolished above who spouts those lines would lift a finger to protect her when some creep takes advantage of her.  I'd like to ask them where the rights of her parents, grandparents, etc. to having their loved one safe are in their conception of that.  If the courts don't recognize such rights of those who care about them above a "right" to drink themselves into rape or theft or sadistic attack or a car crash (what about the rights of the ones who get killed by them?) or the kind of horrible death I started describing, then, as I've so often said here recently, the law is willfully and criminally stupid and unworthy of respect.

In case you wondered about some of the things I've said here in the past week or so, yes, that does have something to do with why I said it.  

The biggest problem with prohibition was that it didn't work.  I won't recount in detail the time I scandalized the kew-el repeaters of the common received, mandatory, unconsidered, non-wisdom about that on one of the then big-name lefty blogs when I made that observation.  If it had, if alcohol had truly been able to be banned during the infamous and failed trial of that, untold tens, hundreds of thousands, millions would have lived full lives, more wives and children would have probably never have been beaten up or murdered,  not to mention others, families driven into poverty or destitution, countless people not suffering the many health problems  which are seldom mentioned from even moderate drinking, etc.  

If even ten percent more of the population or a quarter more of the population lived lives of sobriety, the benefits to the country and the world would likely be incredible to imagine.  If enough did there would be far less of a need for police and others who spend such a large amount of their work life dealing with drinking and its aftermath.  Probably a larger percentage of the announced lefty agenda would come into effect without other government action (which is not going to be forthcoming) than the play-lefty, "civil libertarians" have ever even attempted to make real.  

Remember that during the next commercial for liquor on TV you watch, the next time you see a show with a comic drunk scene, the next time you hear a stand-up tell a drunk joke. Those have never been funny. The next time you hear a report of a "study" paid for by the alcohol industries.

In a period when the intended comic song "Baby It's Cold Outside" is widely and fashionably and arguably justly condemned as "rapey" it's remarkable how few have ever made the link between that song about a guy trying to seduce a gal through getting her drunk and the seemingly enormous increase in consumption of the very thing in the song which is so fashionably condemned  AND THE REAL LIFE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT FLOOD OF LIQUOR.  In that scenario, the condemned song is of nugatory power to produce the effect but it is the real substance which creates the real effect is what is praised.  I would bet you that many if not most of those who would fashionably condemn it would be enraged by what I've said here about the alcohol mentioned in the song having that effect. I will mention that it was never my favorite Johnny Mercer lyric, he wrote much better.  I couldn't care less if it were never heard again.

Sobriety is presented as the vice in modern pop-kulcha and the common received unwisdom, we are as addled by that as we are by booze. The neurotic, hypocritical, sanctimonious,etc. teetotaler is a pretty common stock character villain in pop songs, fiction and theatrical writing, even more so in junk produced for screen. I have no doubt that's how we were supposed to imagine the "maiden aunt" whose tongue was vicious in the song just mentioned. It's pretty remarkable how embedded all of those stereotypes are in so many minds. TV-movie-fiction informed society could be said to be drunk on them.  They clearly cloud our thinking about these things.