End The Green Party A Republican-fascist Spoiler Fraud

THE GREEN PARTY is as ridiculous as ever, touting another election season of epic non-achievement.  I haven't reproduced the entire post from their website. But you don't have to see the whole thing to get a sense of their absurdity.

While I wouldn't belittle any person who serves the public in a public office, that is unless their performance deserves it, for a party that pretends to be a national party this is just one more year of entirely unimpressive electoral victories, such as those are.

Green Party Election Report – November 2022 Elections

At least fourteen Greens have been elected in November 2022 elections:
– mayor (1)
– city council (1)
– school board (3), with a fourth in a tie for the last seat, unclear how that will be resolved
– water board (4), with two additional write-in candidates possible winners awaiting vote count
– community services district (1)
– fire protection district (1)
– advisory neighborhood commission (3)

Green incumbents
– Of nine Green incumbents running, seven re-elected, one in a tie for a last seat, one not re-elected

If this means that half of the seven are being returned to office and a grand total of nine Green incumbents were running for reelection, that only underlines the absurdity of the Green Party going on forty years of its existence, enjoying enormous publicity out of all proportion to their record of success.  And it's obvious that is what it means because they're talking about ALL of the elections won by greens in that number.  I wonder how long it will be before we find out if that fourteen "at least" isn't actually that number or one close to it which is actually, "at most."

Winning percentage
– At least 14/28 candidates for local county, city, school and special districts were elected, with results for two write-in candidates still to be determined and one tie (not clear how determined)

So a grand total of 28 candidates?  Across the friggin' country?  More Democrats got elected to offices comparable to those in my town and the towns contiguous to it and this is considered a Republican area of the state.

State-by-state electeds in November 8 elections
– CA (9)
– DC (3)
– ME (1)
– SC (1)

Maine is considered to be a Green stronghold and this.  

And the highest office of those won?

Bruce Delgado, Mayor, Marina, Monterrey County, California (elected incumbent, 2008-to present)
One candidate for one seat.   2636 votes, 100%.  ELECTED

Marina is a city in Monterey County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 22,359, not an inconsiderable metropolis but it ain't 312 million people, either.

Can an election in which only one person runs and wins be counted as an electoral victory?  I have no idea why no one else ran for the seat except it would seem the voters in Marina have been returning Bruce Delgado to the mayor's position for a long time now. I'd like to know how many of those who have voted for him have been persuaded to join the mighty Green Party.  If they like the job he's doing, that's good, I guess, though Chuck Grassley won reelection again and he's garbage as well as totally ga-ga.   But you can hardly count the winner of a non-contest as someone who was seriously challenged.  It leaves me wondering - though not hard enough to look for the information - how many of the others of the mighty 14 won uncontested elections.  As you go down the ballot, as most of these positions would be listed, it's not uncommon to find single-candidate "races."  Some of them I would imagine would be the kind of positions that they have a hard time filling.  Even when elected those would more honestly be called "volunteers." I mean, three of them are on "advisory neighborhood commissions".  Or maybe all three of them are on the same one. I'm not familiar with the office so I don't know what to think of it. If their role is merely advisory, that's hardly something that counts as political power.  I don't know what water boards are like in other places but the ones I'm familiar with tend to be kind of a rubber stamp for what the professional managers want.

The Green Party's only real national and almost all of its state-wide election presence has been in spoiling elections for Democrats, putting Republican-fascists in office.  Like the old time lefty parties, a friggin' fraud, every one of them, what they ended up doing was fighting against the one party that had actually done something positive when it could overcome the corporate, millionaire-billionaire serving Republican-fascists.  The Green Party is as much of a fraud as their 2016 presidential candidate, the Putin tool and Trump helper Jill Stein.  You should get a load of their Putin friendly policy on Putin's invasion of Ukraine.  They might achieve a worse position than the reflex, knee-jerk anti-American paranoia of Noam Chomsky these days. 

The dishonest portrayal of developments in Ukraine. Russian aggression is rightfully covered and denounced. However, sole attribution of blame to Russia whitewashes an extended history of inimical US interference in Ukraine, contributing to current hostilities. Additionally, depiction of the Zelensky Government as a democratic force representative of the Ukrainian people and selective coverage of Ukrainian military successes deceitfully engender popular support for the failing strategy of continued military aid. The West proudly lauds its freedom of speech and press. We encourage Western media to make use of this right in accurately and critically covering events in Ukraine.

GPUS calls for cessation of unconditional military aid to Ukraine, lifting of counter-productive sanctions regimes, and initiation of genuine negotiations toward a ceasefire and sustainable peace framework! We implore the Biden Administration to use its position of influence to facilitate peace by encouraging peace talks and engaging with Russia to de-escalate tensions – not to fuel war by further arming Ukraine and prolonging a terrible conflict.

The damned Green Party USA, it is a bunch of congenitally dishonest college-credentialed idiots who couldn't tell their asshole from their platform and who prefer defeat for the proclaimed issues (including peace) to strike these kinds of asinine poses so suit their mutual and competitive self-admiration.

But perhaps at least their tally of election night success is something a little like progress.  I remember when the Green running for Governor of Maine, coming in 4th, even after an unaffiliated independent was celebrated as a victory on their national website.  

If Greens really wanted to do something worthwhile in assistance to progress on the issues they claim to favor, they should dissolve the nearly forty year old fraud and work for candidates who can win elections.  Joe Biden in his two years as president has done more for the progressive agenda than all of the lefty play-parties in the history of such "third parties." Jimmy Carter did.  I'm skeptical of such parties in a parliamentary system, in ours they cannot serve any kind of good.  Though their history proves they can serve the worst and they never seem to learn, I'll bet the assholes run a presidential candidate in 2024.  The Democratically Controlled House and Senate this last session, even under the tyranny of Manchin-Sinema (who was a Green), has done more in that regard than all of them, too.  And never forget the guy who almost killed Paul Pelosi was one as well.  Why would it surprise anyone he'd go from a Green to a Trumpzi? That's what their existence has served more than anything.  I don't trust any Green or anyone who was active in that party.  Not until they prove they deserve it and so few have.

The lefty magazines and websites and shows and podcasts that pretend the Greens are what they claim to be might just be the biggest problem with the whole thing.  I haven't gone to see what sources such as The Nation, In These Times, "Democracy Now!" and the like may or may not have had to say about the Green Party recently but they had a very likely role in pushing the greenwash line to help put Trump in office as they did when George W. Bush was installed by a family-Republican-fascist putsch including the majority of Republicans on the Supreme Court.  

If the lefty media ever learns anything, I haven't seen much of that.  As a radical who does what they don't seem to much care about, want things like an environmentally sustainable life, economic justice, absolute equality and real democracy, I've got a lot less use for it than I used to.  Sometimes I wonder if their leftiness is like the alleged New York Times' "liberal" orientation.  But, then, I really have become entirely skeptical of the secular left, they actually serve one master while pretending to serve the better one, to relate this to my other piece posted today.

Catching Up With The Hate Mail: Take Two On This Issue

I HAVE CRITICIZED the foolish movement in some liberal Christian churches to declare "Darwin Sunday" on a Sunday close to the birthday of Charles Darwin, February 12th.  Given that Abraham Lincoln was born on the exact same day as Charles Darwin, that they were two of the major figures of the time who had drastically divergent view points on life and reality, if those liberal Christians wanted a figure to hitch their perhaps sluggish wagons to who was closer to the Gospel of Jesus they would have been far better to hitch it to Lincoln. And if they did that, I'd encourage them to reconsider that, too. I think the liberal denominations could do with a lot less of an attachment to academia and its frequently twisted values and articles of faith.

You can certainly be a faithful Christian while accepting the evolution of species, including human beings, that evolution is what the physical evidence supports.  That is something which many Christians and many churches have long accepted and, unless you go for the fairly modern heresy of Fundamentalism, evolution is not at serious odds with the Gospel of Jesus, perhaps give or take things like a reference to Adam. In my re-reading of the Gospels, I've come to believe that Jesus often used the Scriptures that were Scripture to him, the "Old Testament" not necessarily because he believed in their literal truth in all places but as a means of talking to his audience in terms, images and ideas that they knew and already took seriously. I don't think he was above what has latterly become known as "proof texting" which seems to me is what he did when he used Exodus referring to God as "The God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob," to refute the Sadducees' denial of life after death. But back to the theme of the post.

You cannot be a faithful Christian and believe in natural selection, certainly not as applying to the human species, because natural selection is an ideology which is directly contradictory of the Gospel of Jesus and the teachings of Paul, James, etc. You can't serve two masters, you'll serve one and hate the other and in so many cases the one such true believers in natural selection (by that name or not) come to hate is the egalitarian Gospel of Jesus with its preferential option for the poor, the least among us.  That's as true of the fundamentalists and other advocates of, for example, America's style of fascism, white supremacy, who deny the reality of evolution and despise Darwin but who believe in the malignant aspects of his theory as applied to the human species as it is for the most extreme true-believer in Darwinism who hates Christianity with all their heart.

Darwinism began in the political-economic depravity of the nominal Anglican Parson Thomas Malthus and it began its evil work in such things as the New Poor Law more than a decade before Darwin built on it to come up with his theory of natural selection. Malthus wasn't the start of that, either, it started in the English class system and such things as the Elizabethan Poor Law which the yoked and beleaguered English People still haven't shaken off.  Though the Church of England has, in many cases, made far more progress, led as it is through the consideration of the New Testament as seriously worthy of consideration and respect.

You cannot believe that you are to do to others what you would have them do to you while believing in the Spencerian theory of survival of the fittest, as pointed out here the other day, it is the phrase which Darwin, himself, said was exactly what he meant when  he said "natural selection".  The distinction of "social Darwinism" blamed on Herbert Spencer (despite the fact that Darwin lauded him as "our great philosopher" in On The Origin of Species) that is allegedly not Darwinism is a later ass cover made for denying the truly depraved consequences of believing in natural selection as its depravity became apparent and gained an opposition.

You cannot believe you are obligated to give sufficient material support and help to the least among us while believing, as Darwin explicitly did, that giving them support and help would degenerate the human species.  No one should bet against the massive evidence that given their choice, most people will not choose to do good that they believe will be to their disadvantage, even if they don't believe in Darwin's warning of the dysgenic effects of charity.  Selfishness has been enabled by the theory of natural selection which elevates it to a progressive force in nature (though I doubt any such force as natural selection, actually exists.   Darwin explicitly advocated the benefits to the survivors of neglecting and harrying the poor and destitute to early graves so they would not have children, that is when he was not advocating the extermination of racial groups he deemed inferior.

You cannot believe that the meek will inherit the Earth and believe that the strongest in a struggle for life who win by destroying the weaker in violence, something which was stated about natural selection from the start, shows us how human beings are supposed to act.  

I hold that elevation of killing, actively murdering or through neglect, was the  second most attractive feature of Darwinism for those who adopted it, especially those in the ruling class and those who despised religion.  The elevation of the powerful, the rich and those of inherited wealth as the crown of creation was the first such attraction.  Darwinism believes the strong, the aggressive and the violent rightly inherit the Earth, the term "struggle for life" is ubiquitous in Darwin.  The latter day attempt to introduce "mutual aid" into Darwinism was logically incoherent and an obvious job to "Christianize" it, though the first who did that probably despised Christianity as much as Huxley, Haeckel, Glaton and most of those who were less apt to suppress that idea than Darwin was. It's denial of the literal reading of Genesis and, so, it's utility to promoting atheism among people of overly naive faith was, possibly, the only greater attraction of it for Darwinism's largely little informed lay faithful.   I have noted that, not by that name, Darwinism, natural selection, in its promotion of inequality and racism and, lest it be forgotten, gender inequality, is rampant among American Fundamentalists and the like who support Trumpism, even as they deny the possibility of evolution of species.

Literally everything about natural selection advocates the opposite of the morality of Jesus and, by the way, The Law of Moses and the entire Prophetic tradition.  "Darwin Sunday" is as much as fundamentalism and the prosperity gospel a symptom of Christianity gone seriously wrong.  Or, more likely, the largely college-credentialed folk in charge at such churches buying the ubiquitous post-WWII con job that denied that natural selection was exactly what Darwin and his earliest to his latest disciples said it was.  The BBC PBS plaster saint Darwin is a lie which anyone who does what almost none but his critics does, read Darwin, and those he cites as reliable, Haeckel, Galton, Thomas Huxley and the latter day Darwin orthodoxy,  Karl Pearson.  Read him and his citations and admit that what they claim about reality is, in fact, exactly what I've said it was and at odds with the popular presentation of Darwin  distancing him from the eugenics he explicitly supported and the later development of that into Nazism. Both and their like in some form is a logical conclusion of the theory of natural selection, as I've pointed out a number of times, that was not lost on the scientist neo-Nazi who wrote the American Mein Kampf, the Turner Diaries who was an ardent Darwinst.

I am in the seemingly odd position of being an enemy of the ideology of natural selection who advocates that people read Darwin seriously but only if they take him at his word that he means what he says as a scientist which cuts through the several often cited self-protective smokescreens that Darwin set up while supporting the depraved claims of Haeckel and Galton and Gregg as the highest of scientific reliability, including the earliest documents in eugenics.  The claim of Haeckel that Darwinism was also a contradiction of democracy, supporting an aristocratic rule in the Prussian style (never forgetting he also advocated genocide) in a book that Darwin said he agreed with completely, as I also pointed out yesterday.  

And that is what even a secularist should realize is true that natural selection is as anti-democratic as it is anti-Christian and for the same reasons.  It is an elitist system, unavoidably so, in which those who are best off are to be considered as biologically and intellectually superior to those who happen to be lower in the social scale.  Darwin, his followers and his sons who carried the torch for him opposed things such as universal vaccination because they suspected it would keep too many of the underclass alive so they could have children.*  They were all in on what in the Trump era would be called "herd immunity" which means people who survive pandemic diseases are believed to have a natural immunity which those who die obviously don't have.  Only with Covid, as with the common cold, the virus seems to be able to change rapidly and thwart any kind of lifetime immunity. Primitive and inadequate conceptions of "primitive organisms" and such things as immunology among those with the power to put their ignorance into governmental practice isn't something only mobster As Seen On TV politicians and their gangster thugs practice, scientists are as capable of that as anyone.

It is obvious that is of political and legal importance, it was the basis of huge swaths of American and other legal policy, eugenics, forced sterilization, ranking children for the purpose of discriminating in favor of the favored and the disfavoring of the un-favored, the denial of opportunities for education, the exclusion of many racial and national groups from immigration into the United States, the discrimination against, especially, Black People, Native Americans, Eastern European Jews, Latin Americans, Asians, Africans, etc.  While those evils certainly have other motives, Darwinism, natural selection, provides them with a pseudo-scientific basis.  That is not surprising because Darwin based his theory on an economic theory of utter depravity, that of Thomas Malthus.  

Those who claim to support democracy as they claim natural selection is the controlling force for evolution - and that inevitably will be read as progress based on inherited biological superiority and inferiority, Darwin and virtually every one of his pre-WWII supporters did so - are as foolish as those liberal Christians who uncritically accept the PBS-BBC post-WWII plaster saint Darwin and the ideology of natural selection.  I would suggest that as well as doing what they've never really done, read Darwin (especially The Descent of Man and the last, the 5 and 6th editions Darwin issued of On The Origin of Species, reading, as well, those he cited as supporting him) and also read the critics of natural selection.  The moral atrocity it was was early realized to be by Frances Cobbe in her admirable essay on the subject is also worth reading.  Her observation are some of those from the time that certainly were supported by the subsequent history of the idea in practice.  I think that the only place that natural selection ever has existed was in the conscious attempts to apply it to the human population, there has never been anything natural about it.

*  As also mentioned yesterday, it is one of the great ironies of the post-WWII Darwin mythology that so many of those, inside of science and in the popularization of its understanding were held by him, whether by the economic class, the nationality, racial grouping, exactly of the generations that Darwin hoped would not be born because he explicitly held they would be inevitably inferior through immutable, irredeemable biological inheritance.

I always think of that when someone who is of color, or through their surname (especially the Irish, or, if you extend it two generations, Eastern European Jews) or whose parents, grandparents, great-grandparents were of the white underclass of Darwin's time presents themselves as the biggest, fattest champions of St. Charles Darwin who ever were. They are absolutely clueless as to what Darwin actually claimed on the basis of his theory, what those he cited with his authority of a famous scientist said.

They should read The Descent of Man, the works of Haeckel and Galton and Gregg he endorsed as reliable science in that book and compare those designated as inrredeemably infrior by them to their family tree.  There's a good chance most of the people who are true believers in natural selection, today, would have been cut off from the present if Darwin and his followers had had their way in the past. As cut off as those unborn to those who were involuntarily sterilized on the basis of natural selection through eugenics, as cut off as those selected by the Nazis murdered on the basis of their applied science. They're just lucky they didn't get around to sterlizing their great-great or great-grandparents as Dr. Perkins in Vermont did to so many Abenaki People in his eugenic campaign in 1930s Vermont, something the Nazis studied as they were getting ready to set up their own solution to the imaginary dangers asserted by Pearson and Moul. Or that they didn't die in things like the British death camps, the work houses that Darwin bemoaned as a dangerous excess of charity as he did medical care and innoculations for the underclass.  I know probably everyone in my family tree on both sides were probably in the cross-hairs of Darwin and his disciples.  Probably in most of yours at least enough were so you'd have been cut off from the present.

It is as great an irony as those who claim to believe in egalitarian democracy who are also great big Darwin fanboys and gals.  There are real alternatives that can't both be true and human equality and natural selection are two of those.  Life proves the truth of equality and the benefit of making that assumption in law and society through the consequences of inequality.  Natural selection cannot be demonstrated to anything like the same extent as the horrors of Darwin's Neo-Malthusian vision.  As a claim of the origin of species, natural selection can't be demonstrated at all it has never been observed to produce a new species, it can't be observed at all.  The denied belief that it is asserted to be a progressive force that produces superior life forms through the deaths of those whose deaths, through the question begging assertion, that their deaths proved their inferiority. The advocacy of human beings "correcting" the charitable aspects of civilization by making sure they died was present in Darwinism almost as soon as On The Origin of Species was published.  It was that aspect of Darwinism which Nazism was based in has coexisted with the claim that that is exactly what it is from the absolute beginning of the theory.  Darwin, himself, did that two step in the Descent of Man, in On The Origin of Species, though in many of his letters his true beliefs expressed to other members of his inner circle and class are more direct in their advocacy of European imperialism and the destruction of other races around the world so they could be replaced, another aspect of Nazi though that was anticipated in Darwin's correspondence.  

Well, Yeah. What About Anal Sex? - Vintage Hate Mail

THE EXPECTATION THAT someone who takes the teachings of Jesus seriously and who has admitted that Paul is one of the major sources of the transmission of that will have to follow the expected line on issues of personal morality is something I have no problem with explaining is not the case with me.  In fact, it's not the case with much of anyone who calls themselves a "Christian" from the most far right to the virtually Unitarian.   I am challenged on the fact that I am a gay man while I advocate Christianity.

Today's Republican-fascist LGBTQ+ basher "christians" have no problem with the florid violation of one of the few things Jesus ever said about sexual morality when he said divorced people who marry again (presumably during the life of the partner they divorced) are guilty of adultery.  That is something which most Protestant denominations have allowed from way back though it couldn't be clearer what Jesus meant by that, it is something that the most right-wing of Catholic Bishops and priests have no problem with when it's someone like the adulterous, thrice married, twice divorced Newt Gingrich and his adulteress present day wife.  The then twice-married Gingrich's affair with her while she was a chorister at the National Cathedral, his subsequent divorce and marriage to her was overlooked by whatever Bishop had jurisdiction over his "conversion" to right-wing Catholicism and her being allowed to remain a Catholic in good standing.  That is hardly the only case among right-wing Republican-fascist Catholics in which the most obvious and plain-worded teaching on divorce and remarriage by Jesus is shoved aside in favor or the rich and famous and fascist.  

I don't know if he has cheated on his third wife as he did the first two but if I were married to him I wouldn't trust him - but, then, I wouldn't have married him to start with.  

The same right-wing Bishops and priests and billionaire fascist-Catholics have no problem with a double standard when it comes to those rich enough to buy an annulment or who have the shamelessness to make the claims necessary to get one are the ones who want to deny communion to even the most sincerely dedicated, faithful Catholics who have remarried after divorces, even in cases when a first  spouse was violently abusive or abandoned their first spouse for another spouse.  

Before I read Luke Timothy Johnson's book The Real Jesus, his criticism of the "historical Jesus" movement, I read article Homosexuality & The Church Scripture & Experience.  He began by making the same point above that I have since the beginning of the arguments about marriage equality, that the majority of sexual immorality is committed in the majority orientation of heterosexuality and the Churches, by and large, have little to nothing to say about that in the 21st century.

Is the present crisis in Christian denominations over homosexuality really about sex? I don’t think so. If it were, there would be no particular reason why homosexuals should be singled out for attention; there is more than enough sexual disorder among heterosexuals to fuel moral outrage. The church could devote its energies to resisting the widespread commodification of sex in our culture, the manipulation of sexual attraction in order to sell products. It could fight the exploitation of women and children caught in a vast web of international prostitution and pornography. It could correct the perceptions that enabled pedophilia to be practiced and protected among clergy. It could name the many ways that straight males enable such distorted and diseased forms of sexuality.

Instead, the relatively small set of same-sex unions gets singled out for moral condemnation, while the vast pandemic of sexual disorder goes ignored. In my view, this scapegoating of homosexuality has less to do with sex than with perceived threats to the authority of Scripture and the teaching authority of the church. For those opposed to the ordination of women priests and bishops, or of married people, deviation from the uniform and steady practice of the church (glossing over the fact that it has rarely been steady or uniform) means starting down the slippery slope toward rejecting church authority altogether. And accepting covenanted love between persons of the same sex represents the same downward spiral with regard to Scripture, since the Bible nowhere speaks positively or even neutrally about same-sex love (glossing over the relationship of Jonathan and David, see 1 Samuel 18–2 Samuel 1). For those who think this way, the world is becoming dangerously depraved; a line must be drawn in the sand somewhere, and homosexuality seems clearly to be the place.

Of course, Christianity as actually practiced has never lived in precise accord with the Scriptures. War stands in tension with Jesus’ command of nonviolence, while divorce, even under another name (annulment), defies Jesus’ clear prohibition. And which Christians have ever observed the exhortation in Leviticus to stone psychics and put adulterers to death? But make this point to those opposed to same-sex unions, and you’re liable to find it turned back against you. See how far down the slippery slope we have already come? many will ask. This has to stop somewhere! For them, the authority of Scripture and tradition resides in a set of commands, and loyalty is a matter of obedience. If the church has always taught that same-sex relations are wrong, and the Bible consistently forbids it, then the question is closed.

Johnson points out that his Lesbian daughter's committed relationship had a large influence on his conclusions.  He expresses no patience for those who he says claims the Scriptures say what they don't say or don't say what they say but he invokes the witness of our personal experience as a valid source of moral discernment outside of what Scripture might say.  He points out the difference between modern thinking on slavery with slavery as it was permitted in Scripture.  I would point out that the original statements on that in the Old Testament seem to mean a far different kind of slavery than was practiced by Europeans and Americans who certainly didn't follow the laws of Moses in that regard and certainly violated the instructions of Paul in the letter to Philemon. 

Much as I value and respect the Scriptures, they are written from the point of view of those who wrote them in the times they lived.  As Johnson points out, whenever they speak about same-sex sexual relations, it is not in the context of faithful love and mutual respect and treating each other as equals and being careful to do no harm, it is in a context of the worst things that sex can be used for such as in the rape of children, adults, the defeated in battle, those conquered, the prostitution of slaves, especially enslaved children, etc.  If that's all I knew about gay sex I'd be against it too.   If that's what same sex marriage was I'd have thought it wasn't anything anyone should bother to try to have recognized by the state.

But every single thing that can be said about the sexual abuse that the authors of the Bible seem to have as their only context for thinking about same-sex sex can be said about other-sex sex.  Which, by the way, the Bible often speaks in both ways about.  The story of the wronged Tamar "playing the whore" (JPS) to trick her asshole of a father-in-law, Judah, into fathering twins by her, thus insuring that she wouldn't lose her place in the family she was united to by marriage to his "wicked" and dead first and second sons. He purposely violated the moral code of the time by keeping his third son from marrying her.  And he was hardly the only total asshole among the Patriarchs who set the great monotheistic tradition going.  Even father Abraham seems to have more or less set up his wife for adultery in the two accounts of when he went to Egypt and pretended she was his sister because he figured the Egyptians would kill him to get her.  Whatever else you can say about the early Hebrew notions of virtue and marriage, some of those old stories show they were real sleeveens.  I will say that when Tamar proved that the guy who was the father of the twins she was expecting was none other than Judah, he admitted that he was far more in the wrong than she is.*  I have yet to hear any of the right-wing accuser adulterers (the list is too long to list), johns (probably that one too), rapers of children (Matt Gaetz, any number of trad-Catholics), fornicators (I'd bet that list would include almost all of them) admit that about themselves as they play The Accuser (the meaning of Satan) for their own political gain.

As a gay man who has always rejected anal sex due to the dangers I knew of when I was young (hepatitis, syphilis, etc.) those which became horrifically manifested in the 1980s (HIV-AIDS, incurable TB, etc.) and things like that much more recent misrepresented Montreal study touted as proving the benefits of heterosexual promiscuity but which, also, indicated the possibility that receptive anal sex in males might lead to a large increase in the chance of prostate cancer, I have always advocated against practicing anal sex.  I wrote a lot about that to both the confusion and anger of people who apparently think of sex outside of the consideration of the immoral uses of it. I remember the first time I addressed the dangers of anal sex at Echidne's blog, someone commented they'd never heard a gay man talk like that before. I could assure them I had been since the 1960s when I first heard an idiot bragging about getting hepatitis in Provincetown.

Considering how morally fraught all sexual practices involving two people can be or, I'd assert, all involving more than two (including possibly conceived children) anyone who doesn't see that sex is full to the top with moral problems as money is, is willfully blind. There are even adult consensual practices that are so fraught with dangers that I would assert they are probably always wrong, I think anal sex likely always is. I would assert that promiscuity always is.  I would say that prostitution and pornography, since they almost inevitably involve promiscuity, are probably always immoral.  

Call me old fashioned, but I think adultery is immoral.  Especially among those who commit adultery while denying same-sex marriage to those who are prepared to be faithful.

There are two-person sexual practices that don't have anywhere near the moral dangers of even vanilla, in-marriage, hetero-sexual intercourse, especially if the husband is a jerk or both of the couple don't intend to have a child they intend to care for but don't use contraception.  By the way, I think modern contraception has probably done more to lessen the moral peril of sex than anything since allowing that women had some rights.  I think the moral consequences of an act are the thing that enables us to know that it is immoral.  As to its morality, that has to be a product of both partners' informed, considered conscience.

I think the safest way to avoid immorality in sex is to have sex only within a loving, faithful relationship, always with consent and always avoiding anything that could harm, or result in an unintended pregnancy, or uses, exploits, degrades or hurts the feelings of either of the participants.  For that, for my fellow LGBTQ+ People, that would be either within such a relationship without legal and/or religious marriage or within a faithful, loving marriage.  So marriage equality should be respected in law and society and practiced by those who marry.  

* By the way, Tamar's second husband, the brother of her first husband, Er, who was wicked and God killed him on her, was the infamous Onan who "wasted his seed" instead of giving her a son who would have taken his place in the inheritance scheme of the time. It was Onan depriving her of what might have likely been her best chance at long-term survival and the possibility of having legitimate children, the injustice to Tamar which was his sin. That was among the wrongs of her asshole Father in Law who, nevertheless, becomes one of the major patriarchs, the father of the nations of Israel and Judea.  Anyone who reads the text to think Onan was masturbating solo so as to condemn probably the least morally fraught sex act there is has to be lying when they use that to say it's a sin.  More likely he was practicing the stupid and ineffective contraception method of "pulling out".   No where in Scripture is masturbation addressed that I know of, no more than abortion is. If someone wants to tell me where that is, I'll issue a correction.

In meditating on the fraught election of yesterday, I thought about the perils of "Christian Democratic" parties and those neo-pagan parties, such as the Republican-fascist one, that pretend to something like that.  I think there is a need for, not a party, but a Christian movement in support of egalitarian democracy which takes actual political stands - no tax-exempt status, best to avoid big donors.  

One of the things I think such a movement should hold to, other than equality and democracy is that the attempt to legislate what mature people choose to do with their own bodies on the basis of alleged morality is outside of the legitimate interest of the state.  As with abortion in which the state's legitimate interest to legislate ends at an individual's skin, so in matter of mutually respectful, consensual adult sexual behavior, the state has no right to legislate on what they choose to do.  I would make an exception when it becomes a matter of money changing hands in a commercial transaction, which I do hold that the state has a responsibility in regulating, the abuses which come with even legal prostitution and the fact that prostitution inevitably involves promiscuous use of one person's body by many (men, usually) and the public health consequences makes it a legitimate area for public regulation if not prohibition, the same with pornography. In the matter of prostitution, given the facts of what it is, I would put all of the legal responsibility and punishment on the buyer, not the frequently desperate seller.  The distribution of pornography is certainly something that can often if not always be legislated because it is commerce.  Certainly anything risking the sexual use of adults against their fully given consent or any minors is something that should be regulated out of existence.

Read Genesis, especially in the Jewish Publications Society Jewish Study Bible (by the way, you can get it from them, online) and in Everett Fox's translation with its own commentary.  If you like most Christians, haven't read the whole thing yet it will knock your socks off, especially considering what it's been claimed to have been for so many centuries.  The last thing it is is a set of moral certitudes, it is murky and even slimy in places, just like all human life and thought has been.  That isn't to say, especially taking into account the culture and world in which it was created, that there aren't glimmers of recognizable moral discernment in it, though I think that really starts getting going in Exodus and Deuteronomy - though they're far from being unproblematic too, especially as latterly interpreted into civil law.

On The Elections And What I Know So Far (Which Is Already Out Of Date)

AS I'M TYPING THIS (in the morning), they still don't know who is going to control the Senate but they seem to think the House is going to flip to Republican-fascist control, I would suspect that is an expression of Republican-fascist legislatures gerrymandering and not the will of the majority of Americans who voted in the election, which is an endemic problem under our failed Constitution.  The Georgia Election between a man of character and substance and a Republican-fascist useful idiot of malignant character is too close to call and will likely be subject to a run-off.  I don't know if there were other people in the race but if they had ranked choice voting that might be obvious within a shorter time than with the clunky contraption of a run-off vote.  Though either is preferable to a person a majority didn't want to win the election gaining office, another of the major defects of our defective Constitutional system.

In my state Janet Mills soundly defeated the bargain-basement Trump, Paul LePage and from what I understand the Democrat I run luke warm on, Jared Golden may be on top but the results will await the tabulation of ranked choice for peoples' second choice added to those whose first choice was Golden.  Though I don't like him much, I'd have voted for him if I lived in his district, I'm voting a straight Democratic ticket from now on, I've only not voted one twice and in one case I regretted it. Though I'll vote for Angus King if he runs again, he caucuses with Democrats and used to be one so I'll consider him one.  Chellie Pingree trounced the Republican.  

In New Hampshire it was nice to see Maggie Hassen won over the Trumpian Bolduc, my brother tells me that Trump whined at his low-energy celebration that if Bolduc had stuck to the lies he started running on instead of running for cover he'd have won.  I doubt that, New Hampshire is still more of a Republican State than a swing state and if anyone denominated Republican loses, it's because they lost it on their demerits.  

Elsewhere the news was mixed, I was glad to see that the Huckster of Oz was seen for the snake oil peddler he is (Oprah sure can pick 'em, can't she).  Mark Kelly may win in Arizona, even with the armed voter intimidation campaign.  Arizona like Florida has too many selfish retirees to have consistently decent politics.  That's my generation, now, you know, the one that was touted as the one that was going to save the world, which I am proud to say I knew was bullshit in the 1960s.  

As of now it looks like under President Biden the number of seats lost by Democrats is a small fraction of those lost under Clinton and Obama in their first mid-term, though that's going by what's being said in the media.  As I said, Democrats are always running an uphill battle against gerrymandering so I'd count that as a positive sign that more voters prefer Biden's policies to those of the Republican-fascists and the media that has been pulling for a big red wave that doesn't seem to have washed over America except in those places that seem to be permanently benighted.  The anti-democratic features embedded into our Constitution (exacerbated by the Supreme Court)  are the overriding fact of American politics along with the Supreme Court permission for the corporate media to lie on behalf of the rich and Republican-fascist.  That is always going to be a truth of American politics until the damned Constitution is amended to remove the anti-democratic features of it and to amend the First Amendment to say that there is no right to lie in politics or about public figures just as there was no right to lie about public figures before 1964.  The Second Amendment needs to be drastically amended too, but that's an issue for another post.

There are some real downers, Grassley in Iowa, Vance in Ohio.  I'm not holding any candle for those states anymore.  I will await more news before I go on with this. I have no more hope for the state that once provided a Tom Harkin than I am the one that provide a George McGovern.  As far as I'm concerned, Ohio is just a sleazy state, Louisiana or Mississippi just a bit upriver.

I hope Kevin McCarthy's life is hell from now on because it sure as hell should be.  If Joe Biden wants to do something, starting as soon as the new Congress starts, he should start issuing very popular executive orders and policies and campaign against the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court as they try to quash them, every chance he gets.  Pretending he can get along with Republicans might be something he does as a pose, but it was exactly trying to do that in fact that made both Clinton and Obama far weaker presidents than they needed to be.  I suspect he knows something about that which those two neophytes didn't from being in the Congress with them for so long.  

He should get as much aid to Ukraine as he possibly can before January, Kevin MaCarthy has already announced he'd try to cut it.  Biden should make speeches in states with large Ukrainian and other Eastern European populations, especially states which have put Republican-fascists in charge.  Democrats should take every chance they can to stick it to Republicans, every single chance they get.  They should tell the Republicans to go back to Russia.  

Catching Up With The Hate Mail - I

IN ONE OF THOSE multi-volume paperback would be historical treatments of Western philosophy published around the mid 1900s, the 20th century was called "The Age of Analysis" and the 19th century, "The Age of Ideology."  At least that's as I recall it. I no longer seem to have the several books of that series I once had. As all such alleged surveys of such a vast topic as Western philosophy is (including those produced as such stars as Bertrand Russell) it was more superficial than really useful. I came to reject the characterizations of the 19th and 20th centuries because analytic philosophy, which was dominant in English language philosophy departments of the time (under the influence of such stars as Russell and Moore) was an ideology all on its own and it was hardly the only one around at the time. I read enough of it, along with such allied cults as logical positivism, to believe it was primarily an ideology.  

The 20th century was as ideological as the 19th and that trend in disunity continues. I doubt there has ever been a decade, never mind a century that can be honestly captured in a single one of those labels.  I don't think diversity in philosophy is a bad thing.  It's preferable to a hegemonic unity of the kind that tends to dominate some academic departments where one ideology gets the upper hand at a particular university and can control hiring and other exercises in power.  I have noticed that the product of some university philosophy departments seem to reflect the narrowness and uniformity of that soft-handed but ruthless intellectual thuggery.  Often professional and para-professional jobs get handed to those who uphold the house ideology, networks of such "philosophers" seem to exist and interact with ideological interest projects. That is often to be seen among the professional atheists and what has become of  would be public intellectualism.   

I think that natural philosophy, or, as it's name has been unfortunately modernized, "science" is as liable to the same professional and personal exclusivity and gangster behavior as philosophy, especially in areas of science which are farthest from the practice of legitimate, rigorous verification in nature.  Theoretical physics and cosmology, for now and perhaps from now on, speculating on things that cannot be verified, have become enmeshed in that same power political scenario.  Biology is rife with it - especially the largely speculative field of evolutionary biology in which most of what would be needed to gain a firm ground is entirely lost in the largely destroyed physical record of life and the fact that much of what would have to be known was a product of actions and interactions that would leave, at most, the rarest and generally most unreadable fossil information. About the thoughts and detailed actions of creatures in the past, what was honestly had is found only in the explicit written documents produced by one species, human beings. All the rest is story telling of unknowable accuracy, indeed, the written record is believed to be literally true at one's own peril.  

The "genetic record," while it, at present, can give some good clues that may well indicate something about the relatedness of individuals and species and maybe some of the more general levels of classification but it is hardly infallible in that and it really can't be read to tell us much else, even many of the most salient and important details.  It is one of the ironies of late 20th century and current biology that that impossibility to discern the past for how organisms acted is filled in with the most perilous of claims about allegedly scientific descriptions of the behavior of living animals drawing some of the most absurdly tenuous conclusions about species as removed in evolutionary history from one another as ants and human beings and other currently living species.

I will remind you that when the idiot Toronto University psych prof. and angry-dork internet cult figure Jordan Peterson wanted to use alleged behavior of lobsters to tell us something about the "natural" roles of male and female human beings (as if we are all uniform and our personal choices mean nothing), really to support a pretty obvious male supremacist claim, I could point out that the same species hundreds of millions of years in the past that we are speculated to have in common with lobsters is the very same species we would have in common with preying mantis in which the females often kill, by decapitation, males that would try to mate with them (eating their heads as the dying headless male copulates with them) and, in fact, black widow spiders.  Psychology has produced some of the biggest idiots to have ever been granted the academic and popular and, most dangerous of all, legal status of "scientists" while never actually doing anything like science. If you want to see nut cases in academia, the psych department is a good place to start the search.  Better than many areas of the humanities.  I would assert that modernism has done nothing to improve on that record in any university department I know of, including such as you would think were relatively immune to that such as applied science and technology.

The late 20th century completion of the Darwinist program of reducing the would be science of evolution to the pseudo-scientific story-telling of psychology is a tragedy the political ramifications of which may be playing out in the resurgence of scientific racism, white supremacy and even the neo-Nazism that has again become actively dangerous.  I think the 1970s predictions of the old Sociobiology Study Group in that regard have come true.  Of course the old scientific racism on the basis of natural selection never did go away, it was always just beneath the surface in academic science as the record, especially in their semi-private professional correspondence and babbling shows, now that those are surfacing.  I have also repeatedly pointed out that overt-neo-Nazi style antisemitism was perfectly acceptable within academic "Evolutionary Psychology" until its exposure forced the "scientists" to newly find out how horrified they were to have elevated it with full academic honors for the scientific antisemite.*  

The logical consequence that natural selection supports aristocratic rule, fascism (by whatever name you want to give it) was articulated by Ernst Haeckel with the unreserved approval of Charles Darwin and the implied support of such Darwinists as Thomas Huxley who wrote an introduction to the English language translation of the book he said it in, "Freedom in Science and Teaching."   

Besides, Darwinism, the theory of natural selection—which Virchow aimed at in his denunciation, much more especially than at transformation, the theory of descent—which is often confounded with it—Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant[93] life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it.

Ernst Haeckel,  Freedom in Science And Teaching, p 93. 

Now, who does that remind you of? 

In the case of both Haeckel and Huxley, and more primly expressed, Charles Darwin, himself, that included claims of the salubrious effects of genocidal murder.  In going on two centuries of the rise and hegemonic domination of natural selection as the required ideology of evolutionary science, that feature of it will inevitably return and return again as long as that hegemony is in place. 

Note:  The number of posts I've done citing and quoting Darwin at length about the inferiority of many Peoples, from the extreme West of Europe (The Irish) to Eastern Europe and Eurasia, perhaps no where as cluelessly as in his statement on the Turkish Peoples, "darker races" in general (putting a lie about that in the mouth of an eminent scientist, many Peoples of the Pacific Islands, Natives of South America, etc.  the number of posts documenting that are too numerous to list.  Maybe I'll try to do the task of collecting all of the Darwinism pieces and put them on a dedicated blog with an index.   I wonder just who else with such an eminent place in the popular culture of science and in science itself, has ever made so many outrageous racist and bigoted claims, claiming that the extinction of so many millions of people would be salubrious for the human species as Charles Darwin.  I doubt there is one who was worse on that account except, perhaps, the far less elevated figure of Ernst Haeckel.  

There is lots of important and valid science that is done, more of it than ever.  But the permission given to consider rank speculation based on either scanty or totally tacit physical evidence to be called science, starting in a serious way in the 19th century especially around the theory of natural selection things have gotten seriously out of hand.  Darwinism's extension into the rank pseudo-science of psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethology etc. is extremely dangerous and entirely dishonest.  

I'm holding the those who claim the mantle of scientific method as a means of obtaining, within logical and honest limits, more reliable knowledge about what can be demonstrated or observed and measured about physical phenomena to their claims.  It is one of the great ironies that some of the most ideological of atheists within and around science and the idiot groupies and poseurs who proclaim their championing of science and their claim to speak for it are some of the worst offenders.  Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, pretty much anyone who has had anything to do with CSI(COP) and the Paul Kurtz's alphabet soup organizations of atheism-"Skepticism" falls in that category.  Some of them produced actual science at one point in their careers, some continued with that even as they made common cause with pseudo-scientists, many of them working in "behavioral science," to further their real interest, their ideological materialist-atheist-scientism.  I think they've done a lot more bad to science, helping to bring it into ideological discredit with many people and confusing many more, than they have done good.   [I sincerely hope that some younger people who might read this have, by now, asked "Carl who?"]

I would point out that a lot of them, like Sagan, have produced a "popular understanding of science" that is far more heavily wedded to "science fiction"** than to science.  That trend continues a quarter of a century after Sagan's death, it's probably worse now than it was then.  I think a lot of theoretical physics and cosmology today is more like sci-fi written in equations than it is science, it has to be, the various warring ideological camps within those can't all be right, at best most of them have to be wrong, creating universes and creation myths that have no counterpart in physical reality, fictitious universes, fictitious multi-verses.  And it's all called "science" and treated as such.  I think it would be far better if the term "natural philosophy" was reimposed on those fields which have left the actual methodology of science behind, though in the case of the "behavioral sciences" it would be far more honest to call their junk what it is "lore" of a particularly low-level sort, keeping in mind much of that lore, such as Dawkins' stuff is not based in observation of the kind that generated the sometimes useful and observable casual lore of yore. What any of it means to the animals that are observed is unknowable because even those who are the most intimate of those can't tell us a thing about their real motives.  That's as true of the "science" as it was the lore.  But, then, we can't even be sure of people reporting on that are accurate or even being honest about it and we know it is impossible to get a valid sample of even a relatively limited but large population, perhaps we will see evidence of that this week.  

* As I was typing that, it occurred to me that I can't recall anyone ever using the phrase "scientific antisemitism" as you will often hear "scientific racism".  That isn't because such scientific literature in support of hatred of Jews isn't there for anyone to find.  As I've pointed out one of the more obvious documents in English is the study asserting the intellectual inferiority of Russian and Polish Jews to Britain produced by one of the brightest of bright lights in late 19th and early 20th century science, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul, a warning on the danger of the presence of such Jews for the British nation which was cited in the very scientific textbook used by Hitler and his fellow thugs as they were producing Mein Kampf while in prison. In the study Pearson and Moul note their scientific collaboration with and dependence on one of the authors of that book.  The Nazis produced enormous quantities of scientific antisemitism, as I've pointed out Hitler's second in command for a long period of his ascendancy and rule called Nazism "applied biology" for a reason.  As the career of Kevin MacDonald proves, science in the United States, in the form of evolutionary psychology,  with the full force of the witness to the Nazi genocide of the Jews on full display, nevertheless elevated the author of blatant antisemitism to a full university professorship, editorship of professional journals and the full measure of privileges and honors they bestow.   He was hardly alone in receiving that treatment. Richard Dawkins cited some particularly antisemetic tripe of one of MacDonald's allies in The God Delusion, to little objection among the sci guys of the 00's.  

** That such a phrase, "science fiction" ever was articulated is an indication of how screwy "science" as a popular concept is. And that conception of it is not limited to non-scientists.  If there is one thing that science should should be discernibly not be associated with, it is fiction. Yet most of the "science" that is popularly and even professionally believed and thought of is, in fact, fiction.  The enormous boneyard of discontinued science is vast, especially in such fields as evolutionary biology.  The sections of the "behavioral sciences" includes most of what has been and continues to be the professional holdings of those "sciences".  Yet no one ever considers that as being a problem with what "science" is allowed all the rights and privileges and prestige of science. The unthinking, uncritical acceptance granted to what is claimed to be science.  

And it's not even entirely untrue of what might, with more professional discipline and modesty, be actual science. As Rupert Sheldrake once noted, nutrition science isn't the most successful branch of biology.  Individual organisms considered merely on the physical level are extremely complex entities of related organs and molecules on an individual level, trying to generalize statements about organisms in a universal way is fraught with problems that are likely insoluble. Though some general things might be discovered you're going to have to be really careful about the scope of what you claim if you want to maintain credibility.  I'd bet most people in the United States are pretty skeptical about claims about nutrition after being deluged with that often contradictory and often overturned "science" for decades.  The continual bait-and-switch of scientific announcements about diet and nutrition from nutritional science - often science paid for by industries seeing to use science to their own financial profit - doesn't go entirely unnoticed.  It's about eating, something people do every day.  It's not like evolution for which most people have little to no use for or stake in and in which bullshit flourishes to little notice. 

On The Road To Discovery If Not Recovery

I'M NOT SURE of what "long Covid" is supposed to be.  I know I'm still pretty worn out by what happened in my second go-round with it.  Damned carnivores are going to get us all killed. I think I'm getting better though that might just be boredom with convalescence.  One of the downsides of it is that I've missed the early-voting date in my state and it means I'll have to go to the polls tomorrow.   I haven't been to town since before I got sick. I've lost weight, enough so people comment I've gotten too thin.

I have been using the time to do more reading of Scripture, this time Genesis using the Jewish Publications Society's Jewish Study Bible with its fascinating take on the text and the equally fascinating Five Books of Moses translated and edited by Everett Fox.  The details of the commentary are often quite interesting.

For example, this one which speculates on why the sun and moon are described the way they are as they are being created.

God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night, and the stars.  And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth, to dominate the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.
Genesis 1:16-17

The Study Bible commentary says:

 The sun and moon are created only on the fourth day and are not named, but referred to only as the greater light and the lesser light.  This may be an implicit polemic against the worship of astral bodies (see 2 Kings 23-5).

Which is a lot more interesting to think about than the popular atheist snark about the beginning of Genesis.  The JPS Study Bible notes are some of the best commentary on Genesis I've come across though there is so much that anyone can know only a tiny amount of it.  It's certainly a better take on it than you'll get from either Christian Fundamentalists or from atheists. Though, of course, there being enormous differences of opinion on what Scripture means, no one in their right mind would agree completely or entirely with what any one of them says. You shouldn't read commentary with the expectation that it's giving you the hard facts, though any good one will have many factual references, you have to look on it as a series of ideas about the text, in the best commentaries, well informed ideas but not in the same way you would read a basic physics text.

In the introduction to Jeremiah (I've gone back to read that book in the Jewish Study Bible, unfortunately we don't have Fox's edition of it) it surprised me by noting:

But though the Greek version (the Septuagint) contains many of the same oracles and narratives as the Hebrew version, it is approximately one-eighth shorter (something noted by Brueggeman in one of his lectures) and its content appears in a markedly different order, for instance the oracles concerning the nations appears as chs 46-51 in the Hebrew version, but in the Greek version they appear as chs 25-31 with a different sequence of nations.  Because the text of the Greek version corresponds with fragments of a Hebrew version of Jeremiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, many interpreters argue that the Greek version of the book represents an early edition of Jeremiah that was later expanded and rearranged to form the present Hebrew edition of the book.  Other fragments of Jeremiah that correspond to the Hebrew Masoretic Text also appear among Jews for several centuries following the lifetime of the prophet.  This of course points to the likelihood that writers other than Jeremiah or Baruch had a hand in the book's composition.  

I'm left wondering about the relationship between the current Masoretic text of the Hebrew Scriptures and the other available versions of it, the Greek Septuagint, that from the Samaritan tradition, etc.  I've come to wonder what reason there is to consider any of them as more "original" and so others less worthy of consideration than the other.  

Anticipating the usual Christmas season turmoil, from a Christian viewpoint that issue is important for the use made of such verses as the one in Isiah about whether a child like the Messiah would be born to a virgin, as in the Greek or to a young girl in the Masoretic text, Isiah 7:14.   Presumably those who translated the text into Greek, by tradition some eminent Greek speaking Hebrew scholars, they would have been familiar with both the Hebrew and the Greek they spoke as their everyday language and knew the difference between a virgin and a young girl. I think the most obvious reason to suspect for them translating it that way is because the text they translated from said it that way, though it's impossible to know that.  

The current often repeated popular claim that the difference is a dishonest forgery on the part of Christians, an evergreen of the Christmas season, is absurd, since there were no Christians around when the Septuagint was produced  and it would seem to have been quite popular with religious Jews around the entire area.  That anti-Christian snark and the resulting resentment of some particularly traditional Christians in the face of that accusation is unnecessary and stupid and superficial.  

I think what we have are divergent textual traditions and no way of knowing which is right.  Since the Gospel writers likely used Greek as one of their common languages, the reason that the entire New Testament is written in it, it was natural that they would have known and used as authoritative the Greek version, especially the author of Luke and Acts.  If not for the original text of the New Testament, certainly in later generations, the Greek versions of the older Scriptures would have been more available to them than the Hebrew version(s).  What the actual prophet of Isaiah 7:14 said about the virginity or not of the mother of Immanuel, who can know?  Here's the text in what I gather the editors have selected as its context from the Study Bible:

10 The LORD  spoke further to Ahaz: 11 " Ask for a sign from the LORD  your God, anywhere down to Sheol or up to the sky." 12 But Ahaz replied, "I will not ask, and I will not test the LORD." 13 "Listen, House of David'7 The LORD  will cause to come upon you and your people and your ancestral house such days as never have come since," [Isaiah] retorted, "is it not enough for you to treat men as helpless that you also treat my God as helpless?1 14 Assuredly, my LORD  will give you a sign of His own accord! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel. 15 (By the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good, people will be feeding on curds and honey.) 16 For before the lad knows to reject the bad and choose the good, the ground whose two kings you dread shall be abandoned. 17 The LORD  will cause to come upon you and your people and your ancestral house such days as never have come since Ephraim turned away from Judah-that self same king of Assyria!

And as is pointed out in their preface, Isaiah is one of the most complex books of Scripture, it's especially opaque.  The commentary in the Study Bible on this particular issue says:

1 4: Young woman (Heb '"almah"). The Septuagint translates as "virgin,"leading ancient and medieval Christians to connect this verse with the New Testament figure of Mary. All modern scholars, however,agree that the Heb merely denotes a young woman of marriageable age, whether married or unmarried, whether a virgin or not. 1 5-17: The message the sign represents is two-fold: God is with Judah, both to protect it (v. 16) and to punish it (v. 17).

And, to be fair to the commentators, this is their commentary on the larger context of the whole section:

10-1 7: Apparently Ahaz chooses to rely on the intervention of the Assyrian king (cf. 2 Kings 16.7--9

I'd say in context of the wider passage - and exactly what it means is certainly open to different interpretations, whether or not his mother was a virgin when he was conceived, before the boy "Immanuel" is of age to discern good and bad the kings that Ahaz fears will not be around and their realms will be empty.  I don't know in context if that might mean Assyria and Babylon but their dynasties had certainly fallen by the time of Jesus but that time was well off from when Isaiah is dated by modern scholarship. I don't know what other identifications of the two dreaded kings have been made, maybe by Christmas I'll have found out.

As to the differences between the Greek and the Hebrew, I would point out that it's clear there were pre-Christian Jewish scholars (perhaps as many as seventy of them) who apparently had either a different text which had a different word they  translated as "virgin" into Greek or they translated the same word to mean "a virgin" and it's irresponsible to think they would not know what they were doing either in the Hebrew language that they'd have to have been expert in or the Greek they almost certainly knew as a maternal language.

There is, of course, no way to know since we don't know what the text they were using to translate said.  

I would point out that if the Prophet meant merely "a young woman of marriageable age, whether a virgin or not," you could ask what kind of a sign was that?  How would you decide which young woman who had a baby in the regular way was being referred to among the myriads of such young women who would unremarkably  give birth?  There had to be something unique or at least unusual about the one who embodied the sign, maybe the name of the baby was to be what would, in the view of the wider world, set her and her child apart, so as to constitute a sign. If so where is that recorded? Perhaps that might be why the eminent Greek speaking  Jewish scholars of the time choose the one alternative  meaning that would make it so very unusual and perhaps unique.  Of course even if it meant a virgin would give birth that wasn't necessarily Mary the mother of Jesus in Luke, if the pre-Christian Jewish scholars who made the translation used that word, it's certain that they wouldn't have meant her.

More generally, since the reading of Scripture as much as anything else is used to support often wildly divergent ideas, I don't see how anyone is going to
stop Christians using the Hebrew Scriptures as prophesies of the life of Jesus or from those who disagree with that disagreeing with it.  Both can and should be respectful of the others while they differ and disagree. It's not as if the Rabbinical use of the Scripture arrives at a single, agreed to meaning of it. The diversity of opinion is a widely acknowledged glory of that tradition, I certainly admire it.  God is too big to fit into one person's mind or any denomination or tradition or even the imaginary construct of the entire collective mind of all human beings of all time.

We are all, to refer to Walter Brueggemann's phrasing, all guilty of treating Scripture as if it contained "a package of certitudes" when it certainly does not. That is especially true of the Prophetic books, perhaps Isiah more than any other.  In that it shares a lot in common with every other body of literature which is made common use of by those who come after the original author. Even something as simple-minded as Huckleberry Finn produces controversial disagreement.  I think that's just the way human beings read and think, at least those who do read and think.  I think it's worth arguing about it, I don't think it's worth getting nasty or violent over it - not unless the readings of it support nastiness and, especially, violence, then I'm all for having it out with the nasty and violent.  The merely snarky, the pop-academic and internet crowd, are a lazy, cowardly form of the nasty and violent, they'd run for cover as fast as one of Trump's white-collar lackeys if faced with physical opposition or risk.