The card is both a map and a talisman which illuminates the meaning of CHRISTMAS for the children and their parents.
With Michael Maloney, Christopher Wright and Rachel Atkins.
Dramatised by Nick Warburton.
Director Marilyn Imrie.
BBC Radio 4 1997
I'D BE SURPRISED if Rachel Maddow did the research and cited the numerous uses of Darwin's claimed science in Nazis racist scientific claims or their propaganda that I've done here and as many others have also done. She's smart enough to know she would lose a major segment of her audience if she told the truth about that. Having no money at stake or caring if people don't read me, I'm not going to avoid the topic. This is The Thought Criminal, after all. While what she produces about history is important and often very, very well researched, often finding things that others have not found, generally rising above the typical popular-history style, she is hardly in the business of creating a full view of the origins and motivations of Nazism. I, like Stupy, have not read her recent book about a Nazi plot involving American collaborators and, so, don't know why she may not have dealt with the Darwinian aspects of their race science. I have done that, over years here and I have produced the primary documentary evidence proving not only the connections of all of that Nazi science to the theory of natural selection, I have documented its continuation in post-war and current neo-Nazism, again, using what the neo-Nazis have said about what inspired their ideas.
Simps is too stupid to take any of that in, he's the kind of college-credentialed idiot who had their sole and undeveloped and primitive conceptions of such things in the early 1960s when the post-war lie that Darwinism had nothing to do with eugenics was ubiquitous in that milieu, I believed it, myself, for a long time until I undertook to do what almost no English language true believers in the plaster St. Darwin have ever done, ACTUALLY READ WHAT HE SAID. And going on from there to read what his inner circle of supporters said - especially following up Darwin's own scientific citation of their writing - which proves beyond any doubt that natural selection was the motivation of eugenics in the English language and in Germany. I have noted the articles and books by his own sons tying him to eugenics, people who knew him in person, unlike Rachel Maddow and anyone born after 1882 who never laid eyes on the man, never mind knew him as intimately as his own sons.
I could go over it all again but I know Simps and his ilk will never look at the primary evidence, depending on secondary and, most likely tertiary and more remote sources that are as likely to lie about the primary record as any TV show about it will - probably where most of them got everything they know on the subject from. I'm only interested in addressing those who will look at the real, primary record to see what Darwin, Galton, Schallmeyer, Haeckel, Baur, Fischer, Lenz, . . . said and say about their conclusions from the theory of natural selection. When I rarely cite secondary or later sources I always note that and always try to find primary source verification of what they say. I have never found a single source from before WW2 who denied the link between Darwinism and natural selection or the theory of natural selection and Nazi eugenics, including Leonard Darwin who continually confirmed that his father's role in producing the Nazi eugenics of the 1930s that led, directly, into their genocides. I've given the citations and often links to online publication of what they said.
Update: "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable." Martin Bormann
Update 2: See second stupid comment below.
Simps, if you're not even going to try it's not worth it to give you even this level of attention. I don't have all the leisure time of a member of "the Eschaton brain trust" (they really do believe that's what they are), I'm still in demand for my work.
Update 3: Apparently the ever graying geezers of my generation with nothing better to do with their too much leisure time are keeping Duncan's cash cow going. I don't get regular reports of Simps bringing me into it anymore, apparently the person who used to tell me gave up on it. It hasn't been interesting since about 2005. It's more of a bad habit than a stimulant.
I'M DOING WHATEVER writing I'm doing these days standing up, trying to shift my position so the nerves feeding my leg aren't impinged on, so that has put a damper on writing long things. As it is, the claim that widely held scientific knowledge is uniformly reliable is best answered by a recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder.
You should listen to the video, there are lots of points that could be made, one of them is that the problem in the equation that led to this widespread faith in its claims were actually relatively simple to discover and understand - to the extent that physics on this level could be said to be simple to understand. I wonder how many of the physicists and cosmologists who accepted the conclusion actually did understand it. Considering how statements about the "singularity" and what it meant bled down into pop-scientific fandom and sci-fi, where there was nothing but materialist-atheist-scientistic faith and no understanding, you have to wonder how such ideas could ever be held to be reliable. Indeed, even this refutation of the paper in question doesn't disprove the idea supported by the mistake, Hossenfelder gives ways in which both could be true.
More interesting than that is this except from a long discussion with the mathematician-critic of string-theory and its allies, Peter Woit about the crisis in physics.
And here's a recently posted video by Rupert Sheldrake on the reproducibility crisis in science. Which pretty much calls into question how science routinely practices "scientific method".
I REALLY DON'T want to get into why I think Spinoza's philosophy was fundamentally wrong-headed, but here goes.
Spinoza's faith in the ability of mathematics to represent an absolute view of nature and that ideas are capable of presenting an absolute view of reality are certainly naive and, in one of the greatest achievements of 20th century physics, rightly viewed as being wrong on the evidence. Those are two of the cornerstones of the rickety cathedral of materialist-atheist-sceintism without which that structure can't be propped up. I think the extent to which science "works" for all too human purposes is often based as much on luck as it is on the efficacy of scientific method and mathematical correspondence to what is observed through science. As I have been pointing out in writing online for going on twenty years, the boneyard of discontinued science is enormous and mentioning its contents is forbidden. There are even huge bodies of formerly held to be reliable scientific truth long ago relegated to it which come back to life after the succeeding ideology within science is found to be inadequate. The suppression of Lamarckian inheritance in the hegemony of the modern Darwinian synthesis of natural selection with an early, now quite naive view of genetics appended to it, has come somewhat back to life recently. If the same turns out to be true in cosmology with the recent discovery of those very early galaxies that, according to what we were told was reliable cosmology and physics shouldn't have existed then overturning Big Bang cosmology, it's quite too early to know and the many materialist-atheist-scientistic declarations to that effect would seem to me to be rather premature. If there's anything the history of science shows, it is how thoroughly caught up in atheist religous ideological campaigning it has been. I would say that was true from the start, certainly as the 17th century wore on, in no small part due to the ideological claims of Spinoza and his admirers.
I am skeptical of the holy card view of Spinoza that is the common received wisdom of college-credentialed People of my generation. I remember it was with that ignorant and received feeling of sanctity that I opened a book by him, I think it was the Ethics, and was immediately skeptical of his Euclidean approach to the topic. I also looked at his Tractatus and was put off by his approach in many ways. Looking at that in preparation to answering this, I think he had definite issues with being Jewish - why his calls for the civil government of Holland to suppress the Jewish religion is better than the edicts of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain doing that, I'd like someone to explain to me. I think he was too impressed with his own cleverness and too reliant on an uncritical use of the primitive science of his time, of what he had available as classical "history" and myriad other contents of his arguments to find him very useful, today. He was certainly not stupid enough to realize that the suppression of the Jewish religion would have been accomplished with violence and killing when Jews resisted that, he, his family history with the expulsion from the Iberian peninsula would have informed him of that fact.
The presentation of him as a martyr to reason and science is even more overblown than the fictional presentation of Galileo as the same. It's a romantic use of someone who obviously liked to piss people off and who didn't do that badly for himself, considering how he cut himself off from his family and community. That he supported himself without difficulty and did his writing and corresponded widely with many eminent people shows he was hardly a martyr - he died of natural causes, one source I looked at suspected silicosis from his profession of lens grinding was at least a contributing factor in it. If he died for science, it was a suicide.
In the first part of his Theologico-Political Treatise he was quite willing to mock all kinds of people and their beliefs as baseless and a product of their imaginations when what he deified "reason," natural law, etc. were as much a product of human imagination as idol worship and the propitiation of gods as a means of getting what we want. In looking at it again after so long it strikes me as being pretty naive. One of the more incredible passages early in the book to anyone who lived through the last part of the 20th century contains a typical claim of materialistic-atheistic-scientism:
(16) This element of inconsistency has been the cause of many terrible wars and revolutions; for, as Curtius well says (lib. iv. chap. 10): "The mob has no ruler more potent than superstition," and is easily led, on the plea of religion, at one moment to adore its kings as gods, and anon to execrate and abjure them as humanity's common bane. (17) Immense pains have therefore been taken to counteract this evil by investing religion, whether true or false, with such pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock, and be always observed with studious reverence by the whole people--a system which has been brought to great perfection by the Turks, for they consider even controversy impious, and so clog men's minds with dogmatic formulas, that they leave no room for sound reason, not even enough to doubt with.
First, I would guess that what he, sitting in Holland, knew of "the Turks" was hardly an uninterested and objective assessment of life so far away. My guess is that it was about as reliable as what you'll hear from Republican-fascist sources right now. The same could certainly be said of somewhat closer in location but even farther away in time classical history and biography. When you make such articulations based on such flimsy material as "science" it certainly is more potentially dangerous than if you do the same in the inexact literature of the humanities. I'll forego yet another long critique the use of "history" and "biography" by modern popular-science. I will say when it's a Sagan or Degrasse Tyson who do it on TV, it's pretty much reliably taken as bull shit. Only slightly less when it's a Bertrand Russell or Richard Dawkins doing it.
The modern period in which wars in Europe and the Americas have not been waged on the basis of religious belief have been among the most brutal and murderous in the history of the human species. The First World War, the Second World War, the revolutions in Russia, the wars of conquest waged by the Russian and Soviet Union, the internal warfare that solidified the terror driven, materialistic, officially atheist and opposed to religion Soviet government, the similar and perhaps even more brutal Chinese revolution, the various other Marxist regimes, the fascists in Italy with their invasion of Ethiopia, the biological genocidal regime of the Nazis, the secular United States in the Spanish American war, the various wars to gain territory and extend economic control over Latin America, in the Pacific, the war in Vietnam, the Bush II-Cheney disaster of war in Iraq, etc. and so many others that could be named, all on the basis of some form of the very materialism and rational calculation that Spinoza deified is far better proof than any of the allegedly religious wars that Spinoza had in mind that materialism and rational calculation are, if anything, more deadly than religion. The present Israeli fascist government doesn't strike me as being motivated by the Jewish religion whereas many of the Jewish critics of the conduct of the invasion of Gaza - likely a result of the direct result of the Netanyahu government's corruption, incompetence and irresponsibility and internal political calculation of his government's failure to address a coming attack they were warned of - are motivated by quite worldly and political and financial things.
I will remind you that it was that arch-materialist-atheist true believe in scientism, Sam Harris who called for planning for the nuclear bombing of "tens of millions" of people in Muslim countries as a preventative for the use of the "Islamic bomb" and he was held up as a champion of such materialist-atheist-scientistic "reasoning" with that in the published record. Christopher Hitches was another of the atheist crusaders who their admirers and allies and their basic ideological orientation are never called on to answer for.
The same is true of most of the "religious wars" about which there is much primary historical evidence. Most of those were motivated by economic motives, often the religious explanation secondary or an afterthought to justify what some monarch or the powerful gangster underlings wanted to do. The Crusades were a series of "religious wars" that seem to have been motivated by the situations that feudal gangsters throughout Europe created, as were the "religious wars" that Spinoza would have been referring to. Historically the motivation of "religion" in war is estimated to be less than ten percent. It certainly is true that in the modern period materialism and overt atheism have proven to be even deadlier motives for killing lots of People.
That religion can be used malignantly is no more of a shock than that science, from the start, was thoroughly involved with and mixed up with war making. Galileo and other early scientists were fully involved with things like figuring out the trajectory of cannon balls, later ones on the creation of and improvement of armaments and the theory of war making. I remember when my oldest sister went to university and, looking over the structure of it I was shocked to find out about the existence of "Military Science." They call it that, not "military faith." If that was the beginning of my skeptical, critical view of science and what gets away with calling itself science in universities and academia and the so-called intellectual class, I can't say but that skepticism certainly started when I first looked into psychology textbooks and immediately saw that it was, actually, pseudo-science. I think that effort started with Spinoza's extension of Descarte's method into the realm of human minds and behavior, his ideological assumption that the math and science he, no doubt, was so proud of himself in mastering was applicable to consciousness and other entities that could not be observed or measured was neither scientific nor mathematical, it was sheer ideological assertion made because he liked the idea that math and science, what he abbreviates as "reason" was supreme in its abilities. In that I think he was entirely wrong and the subsequent centuries of constructing the present day manifestations of his assumptions are no more reliable than his original hunch.
Spinoza wrote a lot of stuff, some of it wrong, some of it seemingly plausible, maybe some of it even right, but he wrote lots of stuff. All of it on the basis of his fundamental materialist-atheist-scientistic ideological preference. If he was wrong about that, the chances of most of it being wrong are very high.
Judith, sive Bethulia Liberata, H.391 (1674-76)
Première partie: Stabat Holofernes super montes (Chorus Assyriorum) [00:00]
Première partie: Filii Israel (Tres duces Assyrii) [00:30]
Première partie: Et placuerunt (Historicus ex Assyriis, Historicus ex filiis Israel, Tres viri Israelitæ, Historicus ex Israel) [01:29]
Première partie: Peccavimus, Domine (Filiis Israel) [04:21]
Première partie: Et, cum his clamoribus (Historicus ex filiis Israel, Ozias) [06:26]
Première partie: Quod cum audisset (Historici ex filiis Israel) [08:17]
Première partie: Quod est hoc verbum (Judith) [08:45]
Première partie: Vera sunt omnia (Ozias, Judith, Chorus ex Israel, trois voix seules) [10:59]
Première partie: Nocte autem sequetem (Historicus ex Israel, Judith) [13:29]
Première partie: Post hæc Judith deposuit (Historicus ex Israel) [17:52]
Première partie: La nuict [18:44]
Seconde partie: Cum autem Judith descenderat montem (Ancilla, Duo exploratores ex Assyriis, Judith, Chorus Assyriorum) [21:40]
Seconde partie: Æquo animo esto (Holofernes, Judith) [24:17]
Seconde partie: Et ingressa Judith (Historici ex Assyriis) [30:19]
Seconde partie: Ut autem sero factum est (Ancilla) [31:07]
Seconde partie: Aperite portas, custodes fideles (Judith) [32:48]
Seconde partie: Et cum audissent filii Israel (Chorus filiorum Israel) [33:33]
Seconde partie: Laudate Dominum Deum nostrum (Judith, Chœur) [35:12]
Unfortunately the performers and venue aren't listed, but they do have the score.
Didn't know until recently the connection between latkes and the story of Judith slaying Holofernes, one of my favorite things in the Catholic Bible which is generally left out of Protestant Bibles. Looking for some music to post I came across this oratorio by Charpentier, one of my favorite composers of Christmas music so I decided to post it.
Watch the linked to video about the history and making of latkes, it's quite entertaining and he generally does his homework about the history.
Friday, December 5, 2014
WHY WOULDN'T I want to make continual use of the things one of the finest Old Testament scholars in the English language wrote, someone who has earned world-wide respect for his scholarship and commentary on the Bible whose commentary and analysis includes a German language theologian's scope of external information, a writer who makes it relevant to the latest news. And before going on I'll explain that he doesn't do so in the way that naive "evangelicals" or others do, by pretending he can turn Scripture into one big game of pop-Nostradamus predictions - would that what "journalism" has devolved into would cut that crap out, too. His scholarship is pretty snark proof through not being done with any intention of being snark-proof
If I use Walter Brueggemann's writing and lectures and sermons a lot it is because I have found he often is the only one saying what he says or that he says it better than anyone else I'm aware of. When I find a similar level of helpful speaking or writing from another person, I use that. I have found a number of them. And there is his own self-effacing humor in his lectures and, often his sermons. He's either never found the praise he's given interesting or he got over himself well before I became aware of him. I am also always impressed with his care to admit when what he's saying is his own or other scholars speculation and not based on "objective" evidence. So much of what is contained in the Old Testament, especially, Scripture is the only evidence we have of what is claimed and, as is the way of all ancient writing, it was never intended to be taken as the same kind of "objective" information giving that the best of modern historical and biographical and some scientific writing is. His acknowledgement that it is a literary text with the standards of artistic truth telling instead of mere expository writing is a given from the start.
So I have no intention of not using Walter Brueggemann's writing when I find things in it that are seasonally or topically relevant or if I want to encourage the reading and study of one of his books by showing you some of what they've led me to think. Merely on the basis of what's interesting, It beats the rote, repetitious reruns or rerun of pop-muzak or TV shows or movies or pulp rubbish or the typical college-credentialed received POV that comprises the typical replacement for thinking among the English language college-credentialed population. It was going online and reading the unfiltered thinking of such people in such large numbers that led me to realize how truly futile and counter-productive all of that crap was.
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I think the elevation of pop-kulcha as an easier and lazier and stupider replacement for serious thinking and reading and reflection is one of the most dangerous things encouraged by the American media and the surrender of the great American aspiration of public education to it. I might sympathize with teachers faced with the idiocy that those produce and gave up but it wasn't helpful. Like the conventions of TV and radio commercials, appealing to the laziness and weaknesses of People, that effort was to get audience, not because it was ever a real replacement for it. And I think it has been intentionally done as a means of controlling We the People as a means of making American liberal-democracy a tool of the billionaire and millionaire media owners and their allies in thwarting the aspirations of egalitarian democracy and the universal provision of as decent a life for all as is possible. That was, it is no coincidence, the goal of the Mosaic tradition of the Old Testament, the Prophetic protest against the billionaire-millionaire equivalent class in ancient Israel and Judea and of the Gospel of Jesus and the writings of Paul and James, etc. in the New Testament. I think overcoming the laziness and stupidity and greed that modernism has corrupted us with is necessary if saving the aspiration of achieving egalitarian democracy. If that isn't done, trying to do that is futile.
There is no secular mechanism for appealing to People to overcome their worst weaknesses and vices, certainly none that will reliably overcome the worst of those, greed, envy, . . . the sins laid out as sins of malign consequence in Scripture. And without that, we are doomed. I doubt anything but a belief in God will do that.
That religious tradition has been a victim of both the academic and pop-kulcha attacks on it and the rejection of it by conservative merely nominal Christianity and similar efforts in Judaism. That is no absolutely no accident or coincidence. It is an overt, in the former and a covert campaign in the latter to destroy the radical egalitarianism that is at the heart of both religious families. I am certainly not as conversant with the similar corruption of their fellow Abrahamic religion, Islam, but I suspect the same thing is evident in that. I suspect anywhere at any time that the religious inspiration towards egalitarian provision of a decent life has arisen, there will be such an effort to render that ineffective and to destroy it. That it survived and became a major if not the major theme of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures certainly sets them apart from most of the scriptures of most traditions. At least of what survives in a written form. If you read the book I'm going through now, Brueggemann's An Unsettling God, you would find that is an early and major focus of his mightily informed reading of Scripture.
I find that much of theology in the past and today is a rejection of that corruption of the egalitarian Biblical tradition and am certain that that is entirely more important to producing the continued possibility of human and other life, today than the entire secular philosophical profession. I don't disdain all of secular philosophy though I don't find anything in it that produces a durable program to confront the guaranteed enemies of equality and morally responsible freedom in an effective way. I certainly find nothing in the philosophy based- pseudo-scientific schools of secular political philosophy that can do that. I used to chafe at the evocations of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" by those who want to erect a theocracy which would certainly be or turn into yet another neo-feudalistic anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic cesspool, but the worst thing about that hypocritical citation is that it led to the rejection of what has, in fact, been the basis of egalitarian democratic struggle. I've pointed out that when the early BLACK abolitionists were writing against the enslavement of Black People in the United States they turned to the Scripture, especially the emancipation of the Children of Israel from Egypt and not the Constitution. Sometimes they cited the defaulted promises of the Declaration of Independence or the hypocritical slogans from Jefferson or other idols of secular America, but that was done mostly to demonstrate the hypocrisy of that secular legal fakery.
"What is revealed here is a Holy One who is undomesticatedly available for dialogic transaction; and because of dialogical transaction, what is revealed here, as well, is mature personhood that is commensurate with the undomesticated fidelity of the Holy One"
Man, that's a lapidary prose style if I've ever encountered one.
It was the phrase "mature personhood that threw you, isn't it. And anything with more than fifteen words in a sentence, too.
That's what a life in pursuit of being kew-el does to you.
TWO WEEKS ago I slipped, not on some real ice but on a little bit of frost on a ramp to my brother's barn and instantly knew that, though I didn't fall and didn't break something, I should have worn crampons. I've never had sciatica before, my entire experience of it was when our mother had a particularly bad case of it when she was in her seventies. She had an unusually high pain threshold so when she reacted as she did, we knew it was serious. Worse was that in several trips to the doctor, a couple of middle-of-the-night emergency room visits, they didn't diagnose what was causing her pain until my most assertive sister-in-law went with her and made them figure it out - it took a physiotherapist to do it in the end.
Well, I can report it's about the worst pain I've ever experienced, worse than the pain is the numbness along my left leg and into my hip. Worse than an abscessed tooth. I've sat less than I ever had in my life, it only doesn't hurt when I'm standing the right way and when I'm lying, oddly enough, in the affected side with my legs straight out. Needless to say it's putting a crimp in my plans for this month.
On the other side, it's made my decision to convert to using a standing desk mandatory. It's going to force me to bite the bullet and put a strap button on my guitar if I want to play it. I'm trying to figure out what to do about playing the piano. Luckily, I've always stood while I taught so that's not a problem. Yet.
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It's probably a bit picky but the use of the word "misnomer" to mean "misunderstanding" or "miscomprehension" drives me up the friggin' wall.
