Simps Said:

 

Dec 16, 2023

Even shorter Sparky: If it hadn't been for Charles Darwin, nobody's Jewish relatives would have been killed by the Nazis.

 

That's quite plausible because Nazism's eugenics which included its genocidal programs are a direct result of the belief in natural selection.  As I've noted here in the past, in direct response to such derisive snark we know that the German officer class and others who started the Nazi party were thinking in Darwinian terms during the First World War, as documented by the American biologist and quite conventional Darwinist, Vernon Kellogg.  We know that as Hitler was dictating Mein Kampf that he had been provided with the thoroughly Darwinist and eugenics textbook by Baur, Fischer and Lenz - not improbably the only biology book he ever may have read - that Nazi literature noted the influence of American eugenics - which was, by its own proclamation an outgrowth of Darwinism, that is, the theory of natural selection.   We furthermore have the definition of Nazism, "National Socialism" as being nothing but applied biology from Rudolf Hess.  To top that off we have the discussion at the infamous Wannsee Conference in which the theory of natural selection was given by at least one of the participants as the reason to murder all of the Jews because any that survived the brutal culling they were planning were believed by the Nazi participants in that incomparably brutal intellectual-technocratic meeting to be biologically superior and so would generate a population of Jews who would be an even greater "threat" to the imaginary Aryan German "master race," they fully believed, on the basis off Darwinism, to be creating.  In that they were merely the logical conclusion of things said by Darwin in On the Origin of Species and, especially, in the Descent of Man.  

 

If they would have come up with other excuses in the absence of Darwinism can't, of course, be known but how they thought of what they planned and did can be known and it is fully documented in, not only the secret literature that became apparent after WWII but in their public pronouncements and their propaganda.   There is absolutely no possible contradiction of that short of lying, as the conventional college-credentialed mainstream has been lying about it since the exposure of the atrocities of the Nazis.

 

And, as I have documented through his own words at the beginning of WWII, by that time probably the greatest living authority on the thinking of Charles Darwin to survive into the years of WWII, Leonard Darwin, repeatedly, over decades said that his own eugenics work was carrying on his father's work.  In April of 1939 he published an article in which he said German eugenics, that would be NAZI EUGENICS, had moved German legal and social policy in the right direction.  The article also noted that German Eugenics, begun by men like Wilhelm Schallmayer, was a direct result of their reading of On the Origin of Species.  No doubt they also read the far worse, Descent of Man in which, among other claims of beneficial murder,  Darwin repeatedly asserts that the deaths of those who he considered inferior were a boon to their survivors, even in cases such as the Tasmanian genocide, when it was done through such evil acts. 

 

If natural selection had never been invented by Darwin and Wallace, it's quite probable that there would have been no Nazi party.   

Update:  I don't care what the eejits of E-ton believe they know about something they don't know anything about.

I Should Have Written This Post About Four And A Half Years Ago - Thoughts On The Epstein Document Dump And The Names Not Listed

OF COURSE among those named in the Jeffery Epstein papers released yesterday was William Jefferson Clinton who, of course, denied he had anything to do with the sexual abuse of young women and girls and, of course, that denial is widely disbelieved.  While there may sometimes be reason to not disbelieve such a denial, in the case of Bill Clinton the only one he has to blame for the extent of that disbelief is him and his known behavior with a young woman, though legally an adult, less than half his age while he was president.  If his denial is true it may be too bad that he will be disbelieved but he's got no one to blame but himself.

I glanced through the list of names I saw in the news this morning and most of them I wouldn't know from Adam or Eve (I was expecting fewer Women's' names, I suspect they listed victims as well as possible victimizers) and was surprised by there being so few names I recognized of those in the sciences.  We know that Epstein cultivated some of the big names and many of the not so big names in science and is known to have flown them around on his boy-joy jet and entertained them at his notorious properties.  I wonder if there is another batch of names coming out that will have more of them on it.

My surprise at that can be contrasted with that which the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt expressed a few years back about the connection between scientists (and so science) and the notorious human trafficker and sex criminal.   I used to always read Pollitt's column when I was a subscriber and generally liked her take on things.  But I've increasingly come to see there are problems in the foundations on which those ideas are laid.  They need far firmer foundations than she would accept for them.  I hope others give them those.   

 

In 2019 she said, quite naively:

Epstein’s stay at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center and his death on Saturday will breed multiple versions of the truth, and conflicting interpretations of scientific evidence. That, too, is fitting: Epstein, as it turned out, had been cultivating conflicting understandings of science for a long time through his donations to research institutions and the lasting friendships he formed with legitimate, renowned scientists.

And that’s what gets to me: the scientists. I can live with the idea that the 1 percenters who hung out with the financier Jeffrey Epstein are frivolous, heartless people who either don’t care if he sexually abused underage and barely of-age girls or spent decades living in a cave. I can be bewildered by Ghislaine Maxwell, who apparently had nothing better to do with her money and her fancy Oxford degree than to act as Epstein’s majordomo, social secretary, and procuress. I’ve read my Evelyn Waugh and my Edward St. Aubyn, and I get it: The British upper crust is famously depraved. As for the politicians, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and Epstein went way back. Two masters of the universe with mansions in Palm Beach and a taste for very young women—why wouldn’t they like each other?

She also said:

What I can’t get over is how Epstein successfully weaseled his way into science at the highest level by cultivating major figures in the field socially and spreading his wealth around. Science! The very temple of the pursuit of truth. Call me insufficiently jaded, but am I wrong to expect more of those we rely on to combat all of the nonsense swirling around us?

The list of scientists whom Epstein wined and dined is like a Nobel Prize dinner table in Stockholm. Besides Stephen Hawking, there was Murray Gell-Mann, who proposed the existence of quarks; the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky; the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss; and many more (Virginia Guiffre, one of Epstein’s teenage victims, alleges that he forced her to have sex with Minsky, among other well-known people including Dershowitz.) “As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds,” cooed a 2002 profile of Epstein by Landon Thomas Jr. in New York magazine. Beautiful young women were said to always be in attendance—but, as Daniel Engber observed in Slate, almost all the beautiful minds were male.

And what did the beautiful minds think of Epstein’s conviction? “I never actually believed this underage thing,” computer scientist Roger Schank told Slate. “They might have been in their early 20s or late teens, but when I talked to them…they were always in college or had just graduated college or something like that. They were not high school girls.” And Schank was not the only Epstein science crony to pooh-pooh the idea that Epstein’s girls were underage. “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people,” said Krauss—who, for his part, chose to retire from Arizona State University in 2018 after accusations of sexual harassment spanning a decade and a university investigation that found he had grabbed a woman’s breast.

The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has vociferously denied having been part of the Epstein circle. “I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance,” he told BuzzFeed News. As far as I know, as of this writing, the only scientist to apologize for his closeness to Epstein is the biologist George Church, who also teaches at Harvard. “There should have been more conversations about, should we be doing this, should we be helping this guy?” he told the health news website Stat. “There was just a lot of nerd tunnel vision.”

The most grotesque aspect of this high-IQ sausagefest, of course, was Epstein’s fantasy of transhumanism: improving the human race scientifically, in his case by inseminating women—perhaps 20 at a time—with his own sperm on his ranch in New Mexico. This sounds about as smart as his other idea, which was to have his head and penis cryogenically stored after his death for resuscitation in the future. This was the guy some of the most brilliant (male) minds of our era took seriously?

Well, maybe they just took the Dom Pérignon and lavish conferences on his private island seriously, to say nothing of the $6.5 million grant to help found Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (which the university has no intention of giving back). Maybe they tolerated him only in the hope of obtaining funding for their own projects. Or maybe they just worship the rich on general principles, as so many people do.

As sad as that is, I hope that’s the case. Because it’s even more painful to think they privately sympathize with eugenics and couldn’t even see what a crackpot idea this particular version of it was.

To which I can honestly be astounded that someone who went to college and grad school like Pollitt did could have maintained such a wacky rose-colored glasses view of scientists and, so, the science in whose minds is found the only place in the universe in which science is known to exist!  They are the gate keepers of what is officially to be considered and called "science" they are the ones who are the gatekeepers of who is let into that fraternity (science still largely being one) and whose ideas are allowed to be published as science and which ideas are forbidden to be science.  

Pollitt as a humanities grad (Philosophy and Writing) may had avoided knowing as many majors and instructors and professors in the sciences as I have but my education was in the humanities too.  I knew Women who went into science and heard more than one of them talk about having to put up with the boys club that science is, being the target of puerile, often sexual hazing and harassment, the casual sexism of male faculty on who their future in their chosen field depends.  When I first heard about the connection between Epstein and Maxwell to prominent departments of science at big name universities and celebrity scientists I don't think it gave me a 64th note length worth of pause.  I've known more than one ex-wife of a scientist who thought her ex was a total pig, including wives who were scientists, too.  

More unsurprising in Pollitt's surprise was her cultivated stupidity about the not uncommon acceptance and assumption of and the thoroughly scientific nature of eugenics.   But that's unsurprising only because the actual history of the fact that eugenics began with some of the most lauded and praised scientists of the 19th century,  Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Pearson, etc.  and had an uninterrupted history as university department level science among the most eminent scientists of the early 20th century - having only a short underground period after the liberation of the German eugenics centers, the death camps and the horror of what such science had wrought - to reemerge among many of the most eminent scientists (such as Watson and Crick) beginning in the 1960s and establishing essentially neo-eugenics within the wildly popular scientific schools of neo-Darwinism, Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology.   Only someone as willfully stupid as a conventional secular-liberal college grad of my generation could have missed that happening, even as there were minority viewpoints in science that called it what it was beginning in the mid-1970s.   Only someone as dishonest and willfully blind about the actual substance of the biological, social-pseudo (psychology, sociology, etc)  and trash sciences (such as "Darwinian economics") could have been surprised at the kind of scientists who Epstein would have been attracted to and cultivated not being much bothered by eugenics.  Not to mention some non-scientist sci-groupies like the ultra-Darwinist fundamentalist, the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

The fact is that as long as Darwinism, natural selection, is an established part of what is accepted as biology, eugenics, mild to genocidal, will arise within scientists and within the common holdings of science.  Within the framing of materialist, atheist, scientism, there is no countering moral absolute to prevent that happening and the naive conception of science give it enough force to even overcome the countering moral absolutes of revealed religion in far too many naive and gullible semi-believers.  As Pollitt is a feminist scholar, of sorts, I'd recommend the relevant writings of the great and undervalued 19th century radical feminist Frances Cobbe in that regard.  She was truly one of the more clear-eyed critics of natural selection in its long and not infrequently rotten history.

Which brings me to another thing about Pollitt in regard to this, her even more naive conception of morals and morality, though I'd guess she'd turn up her nose at anything in that line other than "ethics."   Pollitt was a signatory of the third iteration of the Humanist Manifesto - what I think of as the slacker-edition of it.  

In its version of the origin of morals or "ethics" it holds, as all secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic views of those must, that they are merely the product of some kind of social consensus,* there being no other source for those available.  As such there is no such a thing as a hard and fast morality that is not dependent on that consesus.  Which is rather a hard thing to find Katha Pollitt's (and my) holding that grooming, exploiting, seducing and raping teenage girls to be the sex toys of men with celebrity or power, money, in short, within the secularist, materialist, atheist, scientistic conception of "ethics".  Or, for that matter, coming to a "final solution" to eliminate any ethnic or other group which a majority in any society would want to eliminate.  Just as eugenics will always follow wherever natural selection is taken as a force of nature, so will such ideas follow when morality is considered to be merely the product of social convention or that mythological "consensus" that that idea is usually peddled in.

While there is a rather fluid and hardly universal social consensus among some at the moment that such a thing as sexually using children for sex is wrong - at least in the milieu in which Pollitt practices her profession, it's clear that there is a parallel social consensus that holds that if you can do it and get away with it, it's OK.  And, as Trump himself believes, if you're a celebrity, you can get away with a lot.  Look at the results of the 2008 judicial process against Epstein and how he was allowed to walk away with little to no cost.   The sexualization of young children in the media is not only permitted, it can make you billions on streaming services, other online and off-line venues for selling that.  If you want an example of what happens when you slam that, look up the word "Tumblr" in my archive.   Such is the milieu in which Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess Ghislaine Maxwell and the many men who availed themselves of the girls and young women they groomed, seduced, isolated, threatened and coerced into being, in effect, raped by celebrities, millionaires, maybe billionaires, and, yes, scientists, is just as much a social consensus as the one that Pollitt and Me-Too hold as a social consensus.  While I'm sure there are many who participated and supported #Me-Too who have a more stable and less fluid structuring of morals or "ethics" if you reject that there is such a thing as a moral absolute you're up "Skepticism" creek without a paddle just wen you need it most.

I looked into that Humanist Manifesto that Pollitt signed and, just as I expected to see, I saw the name of the late Paul Kurtz circle sexologist Vern Bullough's name.  Vern Bullough was an atheist, social (arguably) scientist, who, I expect, held a similar view of the origin and conditions under which morality or "ethics" exists.  He clearly comes from approximately the same milieu in which Pollitt navigates and, before it became inconvenient to be open about such things, he was a supporter and editor of Paidika, a child sex abuse promoting and practicing entity which called for the elimination of laws setting a minum age of consent for a child to agree to have sex with an adult.  Such ideas were not uncommonly found among those circles in the 1970s and even into the 80s and participating in that or merely holding that as a desirable thing wouldn't get you black-balled from within those circles."   If anything, being a vigorous critic of that, such as Andrea Dworkin was, would be more likely to get you black balled.   And, as I've noted, it's long been a part of mainstream commercial culture, pop culture, movies, pop music, even those old relics, books.

Among the things I've learned since starting to address the culture of atheism, especially the "new atheists" how little room there is between such "ethics" as they might advocate and those of the vulgar materialists of the facist-Nazi-white supremacists.   I'd hold up someone she slammed in that article, Dershowitz, as a typical specimen of what that leads to.   I'd also remind her that that now moribund then hot-bed of the new atheism, the Science Blogs, were funded by Epstein and Maxwell.  

If nothing else there is something about science that has been obvious from the time that its founders started working for princes and kings and governments, scientists are always on the make for money.  Always.  I once was told by a particularly successful biologist that she felt like a shill because of the time she spent writing grants instead of doing her work.   That thirst for funding doesn't go down as the size of the science goes up.   That scientists are susceptible to the deep pockets of a morally corrupt pieces of scum like Epstein and Maxwell is about as unsurprising as them taking money from big business and the military.   

I'm frankly shocked that someone could reach Pollitt's age and not understand that much about one of the foremost forces in contemporary human culture.   Or notice the connection between that and such holdings that there is no such thing as any moral absolute.  And the convenience of having no such a thing as a moral absolute not interfering with it.  I'm kind of surprised that there aren't a lot more compromised sci-guys than there are on that list.  

*  Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity, and to making informed choices in a context of freedom consonant with responsibility.    

There is certainly enough of a gaping chasm of a loophole in that pablum which, clearly, could contain advocacy for the legalization of adults raping children or, I also assert,  eugenics, everything from passively discouraging groups from having children up to and including active programs of genocide.   Eugenicists, almost to a person, saw what they did as being "consonant with responsibility" including their ranking of human beings on scales of economic (though not called that) value. 

"man transforms himself by conquering his liberty"

 More from the introduction to A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez


A reflection on the theological meaning of the process of the liberation of man throughout history demands methodologically that we define our terms.  The first part of this book is devoted to  purpose.  This will enable us to indicate why we pay special attention in this work to the critical function of theology with respect to the presence and activity of man in history.  The most important instance of this presence in our times, especially in underdeveloped and oppressed countries, is the struggle to construct a just and fraternal society, where people can live with dignity and be the agents of their own destiny.  It is our opinion that the term "development" does not well express these profound aspirations.  "Liberation," on the other hand, seems to express them better. Moreover, in another way the notion of liberation is more exact and all-embracing;  it emphasizes that man transforms himself by conquering his liberty throughout his existence and his history...

This is a fascinating concept so totally at odds with the "enlightenment" conception of humanity and which demonstrates how radically different liberation theologies view of human beings is from that of the inadequate and failed 18th century conception of "liberty."  That People would need not only to obtain liberty but to "CONQUER HIS LIBERTY THROUGHOUT HIS EXISTENCE AND IN HIS HISTORY" is the definition of a fully adult conception of freedom, not only from unjust external opposition but in opposition to the self-enslaving and blighting aspects of our own desires and personalities.  That is an entirely different view of "liberty" of freedom which is exactly NOT in line with the pop-culture or even the elite culture's view of human existence but which, in addition to "be agents of their own destiny," makes them responsible within such freedom to reject choices that would thwart or hamper or attack "a just and fraternal society," indeed, even those choices that would prevent or deconstruct such a society.  That is not only in line with the New Testament and the testimony about the teachings of Jesus, Paul, etc. but the description of the earliest Jewish Christian communities.  It is certainly informed by the long prophetic testimonies and declarations about the corruption of the Davidic-Solomonic regime as it forgot the Sinai-Deuteronomic elucidation of reality.

The modern concept of "development" takes as a given that "a rising tide raises all boats" as JFK put it, it doesn't notice that it's the pirate boats that prosper in such a tide of history.  It doesn't really care about that.  I mentioned a while back being dismayed when I heard the retired Representative Barney Frank speaking in favor of economic inequality as an engine of progress, clearly he was someone who bought into that conception of "development."  One which results in a world in which billionaires are a ruling class unto themselves, eating entire countries, even those which are supposed to have the strongest democratic institutions.  Some of those billionaires leading some of the strongest gangster-capitalist countries in the world, such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, using the American First Amendment as interpreted by Supreme Courts starting in the 1960s to attack and destroy America's merely liberal democracy.  Liberal democracy in this period exposed as doomed by such assumptions as that there is a right for the media to lie and that money is speech, thus giving billionaires billions of times more of that than those with nothing possess.  The very bases of 18th-19th and 20th century liberal democracy carries the poisons fatal to it.  We are not that far removed from Latin American in the 1970s under the yoke of American and European capitalism, we are all colonial subjects of the world-wide billionaire class and their owned and controlled media.

As pointed out in many posts here, Scripture presents a different and radically more effective idea of how to change things.

. . . The Bible presents liberation - salvation - in Christ as the total gift, which, by taking on the levels we indicate, gives the whole process of liberation its deepest meaning and its complete and unforeseeable fulfillment.  Liberation can thus be approached as a single salvific process.  This viewpoint, therefore, premits us to consider the unity, without confusion, of man's various dimensions, that is, his relationship with other men and with the Lord,  which theology has been attempting to establish for some time;  this approach will provide the framework for our reflection.

It is fitting, secondly, to show that the problem which the theology of liberation poses is simultaneously traditional and new.  This twofold characteristic will be more evident if we analyze the different ways in which theology has historically responded to this problem.  This will lead us to conclude that because the traditional approaches have been exhausted, new areas of theological reflection are being sought.  Our exclamation should help us remove the obstacles from our path and move ahead more quickly.  The second part of this work deals with that matter.  

The preceding analysis leads us to consider the "practice" of the Church in today's world.  The situation in Latin America, the only continent among the exploited and oppressed peoples where Christians are in the majority, is especially interesting.  An attempt to describe and interpret the forms under which the Latin American Church is present in the process of liberation - especially among the most committed Christian groups- will allow us to establish the questions for an authentic theological reflection.  These will be the first effots along these lines, the third part of this treatise is devoted to this atempt.

The previous remarks make it clear that the question regarding the theological meaning of liberation is, in truth, a question about the very meaning of Christianity and about the mission of the Church.  There was a time when the church responded to any problem by calmly appealing to is doctrinal and vital resources.  Today the seriousness and scope of the process which we call liberation is such that Christian faith and the Church are radically challenged.  They are being asked to show what significance they have for a human task which has reached adulthood.  The greater part of our study is concerned with this aspect.  We approach the subject within the framework of the unity and, at the same time, the complexity of the process of liberation centered in the salvific work of Christ.  We are aware, however, that we can only sketch these considerations, or more precisely, outline the new questions - without claiming to give conclusive answers.  

So much that could be commented on.

Last year I read an article about the billionaire financed "traditional-Catholic" fashion which, among other things, wanted to go back to using the old and awful Baltimore Catechism for instructing Catholics, both children and adults.  The article noted how such a notion was a call for the infantilization of Catholics.  I'm old enough to remember when the Baltimore Catechism was in use, how insulting and degrading it was due exactly to that infantlizing approach to catechesis.  The entire program of such "traditional-Catholicism" is  to move away from any intellectual engagement with the important questions of life into a "pray-pay-obey" regime favored by the right-wing Catholic hierarchy, so many of whom had little to no direct pastoral relationship to Catholics who lived lives under various yokes of oppression.  I remember some of my mother's cousins who watched the most effective conjurer of that stuff, the late Mother Angelica and her EWTN cultic TV network.  They longed for a return to the Church they knew from their time in Catholic schools in the 1930s, with masses in a language they didn't know, sermons about nothing much and the rote praying of the rosary.  They were old and childless and lived a life pretty much within the confines of other such people, resenting the influx of Latino people into their city, even though they were as Catholic as they were.  

I think in many ways the same problems that face the Catholic Church, a question of mature and active adult thinking and adult taking of moral responsibility is the same problem that is destroying American democracy.  Infantilization, whether through the old and lifeless forms of pre-Vatican II Catholicism or through the never really reformed aspects of our corrupt Constitution and the white supremacy that it was structured to protect and promote, it is an encouragement towards puerility and infantilizaiton, a seduction into that and the discouragement of adult facing of reality and moral responsibility.  I think the reality that that has been primarily discouraged through the libertarian wet-dream of the "free press" as defined by the American Supreme Court, the corrupt and morally depraved popular media whether in English, Italian, Spanish, etc. as it peddles fantasy and unreality and, yes, resentment, envy, hate, packaged for the easiest and most seductive sale is among those things which we will face and end as adults or watch the aspiration of egalitarian democracy melt and run through our hands no matter how hard we try to grasp it.  

Broadway Stevey Simps Says

 "The American media is in the business of peddling lies, for the most part. Especially in their entertainment divisions which is what most people consume in their corrupted and seduced minds."

You're so right, Sparky. The fact that "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" were the two biggest movies of 2023 proves how evil movies are, and why people should boycott them as a protest against facism.

First, since you are always getting into your meter maid of orthography costume and commenting on my copy,  that's "f-a-S-c-i-s-m. 

If you think that the majority of Americans who imbibe entertainment for many more hours a day than they do imbibing accurate information aren't affected negatively by it you must be at a total loss for how Trump ever rose so improbably from being a fascistic fictional character in a "reality" TV show to becoming the greatest single danger that America's liberal democracy has faced since the Confederacy.   He rose on the power of entertainment TV, Andrew Dice Clay style shock jock style radio and the demotion of TV and radio "news" to a high end of Joe and Mika (he was a regular call-in feature on their "morning news" show) and the feuilleton sections of print rags like the New York Post and New York Times.  

And I could make similar points about the political career of the previous record-holder for criminality in a modern American presidential administration, Ronald Reagan.  

There are only so many hours in a life, hours spent on entertainment are not hours spent on the serious and more difficult pursuit of learning about what is really happening in the world. While a daily diet of fiction, taken as fiction, isn't exactly a diet of lies, if it is mistaken as reality or a close approximation of that - as I learned even PhD holders in disturbingly large numbers do from the years I spent reading the comment threads at the baby blue blog - it may as well be a diet of lies.  The "noble cause of the Confederacy" as pushed by Hollywood from the 1910s and in pop culture from well back into the 19th century is an enduring lie that blights the lives of People of Color as the lies of "the old way-est" has so much to do along the same line in the Republican-fascist promotion of arming their suckered white supremacist invisible army that any thinking person realizes is a real threat to us all.  

You spent your life with your head stuck up the ass end of American commercial culture and look how you turned out.  It's not any great stretch to imagine the same thing among someone who wasn't acculturated into the ambient mid-brow, college-credentialed milieu in which you've lived your life.  Considering the fact of New York City politics and the politics of New York during your lifetime, figures like Giuliani, Pataki, D'amato and the other Republicans and, then, Republican fascists who regularly gain office WITHOUT THE VOTES OF PEOPLE IN YOUR MILIEU, I'd have thought you'd have learned something over the decades that's been going on.   But people who spend their lives in entertainment and fiction don't learn much and don't think much.  

 Update:  Simps says further: 

"You spent your life with your head stuck up the ass end of American commercial culture and look how you turned out. "

You mean successful, loved and capable of joy? Yeah, I turned out awful. Get back to me when you can make a similar claim, you pathetic prig.

When I am as delusional about my life as you are, in other words?   I don't know which comparison to your claim is more apt, Trump or Hyacinth Bucket.  

Update 2:  As The Days Grow Longer The Simps Grows Wronger

 "When I am as delusional about my life as you are,"

Gee, I don't know Sparky -- after all, you're the one who claimed Guy Lombardo's band was better and more important than the Beatles.

Looking in my archive, I find that I've corrected him on this point before:

Moron says what?

I think the only things I ever said about Guy Lumbardo was that he was one of Louis Armstrong's favorite musicians and that he had more musical competence than a lot of rock musicians.  Or rock critics, though I don't think I said that.  You can tell when Dopey is lying because his lips or fingers are moving.   Louis Armstrong, by the way, is one of the greatest geniuses in musical history, Dopey isn't.   Who would you suspect is more credible? 

He got pissed off when I said that  hearing some talent deficient adenoidal post-teen intone "Imagine" did what I thought was impossible, making me yearn for yet another of Guy Lumbardo's gooey renditions of Auld Lang Syne, though not so much as going to bed early and missing the new years ball drop entirely.  He's never gotten over it and, like everything processed in the TV trained mind of Simpy Sales, it's become self-serving fiction.  Like I said, Trump or Hyacinth, take your pic. 

I'll end by saying it, mop heads.  

Update 3:  Longer And Wronger

:"I don't know which comparison to your claim is more apt, Trump or Hyacinth Bucket.:

DEFINITION OF IRONY: A provincial hick nitwit snob criticizing me for having watched too much TV and television by comparing me to an obscure character from a crappy British TV show.

I haven't had a TV since HD was made mandatory and I know who who that is.  I'll bet easily 90% of casual PBS viewers would know who that was, not to mention anyone else.  Hell, Simps, even you know who she is.  You pretending not to realize that seems so very Hyacinth to me.  

Orrin Evans Quartet featuring Ralph Bowen

 

 

Orrin Evans - Piano
Ralph Bowen- tenor
Ugonna Okwego - bass
Donald Edwards- drums

"Why didn't you post about Simps during the week between Chrismas and New Years like you said you would."

As the late Alfred Lunt is reputed to say when complimented on he and his partner, Lynn Fontanne,  sticking to the stage instead of going on the movies, "Oh, we can be bought but we can't be bored."

It's essentially making bricks with the straw that comes out of his head,  I can do it but the results aren't generally worth it.   Maybe I should go back to answering him in limericks again.   My rule was that I wouldn't post it if it took me more than five minutes to come up with one.  Usually it took a lot less than that. 

Or in the form of Burma Shave signs.  I remember the tail end of the advertising campaign, there used to be a set on the highway into a town two towns away from here that stayed up a long, long time after they stopped producing them.  Shows you how old I am.  

A Post For The New Year

Our purpose is not to elaborate an ideology to justify postures already taken, nor to undertake a feverish search for security in the face of the radical challenges which confront the faith, nor to fashion a theology from which political action is "deduced."  It is rather to let ourselves be judged by the Word of the Lord, to think through our faith, to strengthen our love, and to give reason for our hope from within a commitment which seeks to become more radical, total, and efficacious.  It is to reconsider the great themes of the Christian life within this radically changed perspective and with regard to the new question posed by this commitment.  This is the goal of the so-called theology of liberation.

Many significant efforts along these lines are being made in Latin America.  Insofar as we know about them, they have been kept in mind and have contributed to this study.  We wish to avoid, however, the kind of reflection which - legitimately concerned with the prevention of the mechanical transfer of an approach foreign to our historical and social coordinates- neglects the contribution of the universal Christian community.  It seems better, moreover, to acknowledge explicitly this contribution than to introduce surreptitiously and uncritically certain ideas elaborated in another context which can only be fruitful among us if they undergo a healthy and frank scrutiny.  

From the introduction of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez  

I can't but think that most people on reading that would think "Marxism" though I think in the context of Latin American in 1971 capitalism was as much on the mind of Gustavo Gutierrez.  It was a period marked by the double-speaking, two-edged sword of the Kennedy-Johnson administration Alliance for Progress and the even more soured handling of American policy towards Latin America by the Nixon administration.  I think too many Americans who read the Latin American literature would have done well to read, re-read and really think about these two paragraphs.  It would also have been best if they really considered the warning against introducing "uncritically certain ideas elaborated in another context," whatever good to be had from those available only through "a healthy and frank scrutiny."

Since the publication of this book, probably the most influential work in theology of the past half century, numerous other schools of "so-called theologies of liberation" have risen up and, in many cases, flourished, if nowhere else than among those living in the contexts which those theologies address.  By this time James Cone, the pioneer of Black Liberation Theology was already writing out of the context of Black People living under white supremacy.  Women were writing a related but different and distinct kind of theology based on their living with male supremacy.  At times they addressed and criticized even liberation theologies being written my male writers and, in many cases, the male theologians heard them and took them seriously, consequently taking those voices into account.  Certainly LGBTQ+ People have been writing a different theology that addressed their own lives and experiences of oppression in light of the experience of God as addressed in Scripture.  That's no surprise, the past month's short peek into Walter Brueggemann's take on the Hebrew Scriptures prove that that began in the expression of those experiences in the particular context of The Children of Israel, their experiences of life and their experience of a need of liberation.  If any Christian wants to slam "liberation theology" they'd better think twice because if that were to be eliminated from Christianity, pretty much all of Scripture would have to go because the very heart of it is a repeated sounding of theologies of liberation, starting with Exodus, certainly, and very arguably even before that in the book.  

I think among the most needed theologies of liberation are those who address the American and other "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" in the bondage the sin of white supremacy and the cargo cultism of Republican-fascism.   Today, in the United States, the large majority of time you hear the word "Christian" that's the heresy that is meant by it.   

Anywhere there has been a rise of racist, bigoted excluding nationalism, there is a need of a countering theology of liberation.  I think there is a need of liberation from TV and other hegemonic, life eating media.  In a Latin American context, from the likes of Univision which regurgitates the seduction catering to our weakness and is in the process of harnessing People to their own oppression.  The same can be said of English language TV and media, up to and including such supposedly respectable venues as PBS, NPR and the deeply corrupt BBC.  Wherever there is inequality, wherever there is bigotry or gender based oppression there is a need of a theology of liberation, wherever there is privilege and the an elite, wherever there are those seduced by materialism and acquisitive mental illness there is a need of a theology of liberation to overcome those.  That was what was needed on the American left for the past century and a quarter or more, not Marxism or anarchism or some pseudo-scientific, bound to be rejected, bound to fail secular program.  In the past month I have become convinced that that nonsense, indeed, started with the generations of Descartes and Spinoza and the early period of scientism and its increasing adoption as the house ideology of Western and now world academia.  Brueggemann repeatedly notes that the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures were uncredentialed poets who spoke out of their artistic inspiration and out of the Sinai tradition of Hebrew prophecy.  Jesus was certainly uncredentialed, in a commonly held modern fable of him, he, as Paul and others are presumed to be illiterate.  In the anachronistic slogan of the recent and fading new-atheism, they were "illiterate bronze-age goat-herders."  

Even as I have rejected the prescriptive aspects of Marxism, which has had among the most disastrous and evil series of trials in real life of any ideology ever developed by human beings except monarchy, I have acknowledged that his critique of capitalism has a lot in it to learn from.  Capitalism is another system which has had a disastrous and evil trial in human history, the example of the large majority of People living under it, especially in such places as Latin America, Asia, Africa, etc. proves that it is sheer evil.  The worst thing that Marxism produced was the stupid and facile mounting of a dualism in which we were required to choose "which side are you on."  That there were other alternatives which rejected both is one of the most stupidly unconsidered aspects of modern culture.  That one of the aspects of that alternative existed in the Hebrew scriptural tradition in the rejection of lending money at ruinous rates without having state ownership of everything only goes to show how corrupted religion has been in the modern period, as corrupted as it was under feudalism in the middle-ages.  I don't think there is such a thing as a durable Marxist regime, they seem to always go into a post-Marxism that is not only indistinguishable from capitalism, they are among the most brutal expressions of capitalism.  

I think in the theologies of liberation may be producing practical and concrete, instead of merely theoretical ways around all of that through their addressing the lives of those who are afflicted by capitalism and in their experience of Marxism.  Nicaragua under the Ortega gang is just another example of how Marxism eventually gives way to gangster capitalist rule, as are Russia and the post-Soviet states as well as Communist China which is the preeminent state-capitalism under Communist rule.  That the present junta in Nicaragua is in the process of suppressing the Catholic church if, for now, somewhat less violently than the junta that they overthrew about four decades ago only shows that Christianity which addresses liberation, justice, equality, environmental justice, etc. will be as opposed by Marxism and post-Marxism as it is, in fact, by capitalism.  The American experience of billionaire and millionaire financed opposition to Pope Francis and the practice of Christianity is pretty much the same thing.  I have ever confidence that the coming years will see a billionaire-millionaire financed American schism, probably led by Raymond Burke or another of the reactionary bishops or cardinals.   If the next Pope is even close in their intentions to Francis and his attempt to make the Catholic church Christian, that's going to come.  In the mean time such movements as the Roman Catholic Women Priests and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement will probably slowly grow, identifying as Catholic even as they are officially rejected by the hierarchy.   I wouldn't be surprised if it started while Francis is still alive or soon after the next Pope is elected.   And, as always with American media, they will be presented as the face of "real Catholicism" just as the cargo-cultist, white supremacists are presented as "Christianity."   The American media is in the business of peddling lies, for the most part.  Especially in their entertainment divisions which is what most people consume in their corrupted and seduced minds.