Friday, June 7, 2024

OK, I'll Use Up My Once A Month Posting On The Topic Now - An Impomptu Post

LIKE SO MANY COLLEGE CREDENTIALED, ILLITERATES,  Simps has a very limited repertoire of tropes he goes over again and again and again, for decades and scores of years.   It's why he continually goes over the pop kulcha drivel that he made the center of his so-called work life,  rehashing the same old overplayed pop music and pop movies and pop TV shows over and over and over again, saying what others said a half century and more ago, probably where he got those tropes from originally.  There's an episode of the very entertaining radio drama style online series Black Jack Justice that has that practice of the "critics" as a central part of its plot, which you might find amusing. 

Hammer of Justice

 

But enough of that,  this is serious because it deals with serious things that shouldn't be the subject of humor or light banter.  

One of the things that Simps is always saying is that I slighted the apparently the only book on the topic he claims to have read I (I don't think he ever did read it)  Berlin Diary by William Shirer because he doesn't note that Darwinism was the primary motive behind the Holocaust.  What I prefer to call the Shoah because there was nothing religious about the Nazi murder of millions of Jews or their murders of many others targeted for murder.    

Unlike Simps, who claims to have read the book,  I knew that the book only covered the period before the United States entered the war, even before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.  It was published on June 20, 1941, and covers a period even earlier than that.   The Holocaust as it is generally designated hadn't started by end of the period the book covers, though, as I pointed out in one of two answers to that accusation, the Nazi mass murders, including its trial run of murdering the disabled, started in 1939 in the T-4 murder campaign.   That mass murder was explicitly Darwinist in that it was done under the umbrella of eugenics - I have proven, definitively that eugenics was born out of both Francis Galton's and Wilhelm Schallmeyer's reading of On the Origin of Species,  no less an expert than the inventor of eugenics, Galton said that was his inspiration in his memoir (publishing the glowing letter that Charles Darwin sent him on the publication of his first book length treatment of eugenics, Hereditary Genius.  [Note: you can search those posts in my archive, this entire text would be red if I provided links for all of the posts I've written on the topic.]  

In April 1939, no less an expert on eugenics, Galton's successor as the head of the Eugenics Society in Britain and probably the world's leading expert on the thinking of Charles Darwin at that time,  his son Leonard Darwin attributed the start of German eugenics to Schallmeyer, stating that it was his independent reading of On The Origin of Species which led to his independent conclusions in eugenics.   I also showed, conclusively, that Schallmeyer's predecessor in German eugenic thinking and advocacy of just such mass murder, Ernst Haeckel, was also inspired in his thinking directly by his reading of Darwin and Darwin repeatedly IN WORK INTENDED TO BE TAKEN AS HARD SCIENCE, praised the relevant publications by both Galton and Haeckel, INCLUDING HAECKEL'S CONTENTION THAT MURDERING THOSE DEEMED INFERIOR WAS BENEFICIAL FOR THE SURVIVING (AND MURDERING) POPULATION.   

Here are links to the two posts I made on September 19 and 20, 2017, refuting the same claim about Berlin Diaray.  

Since from time to time I look farther into the matter of eugenics and its relation to attempted genocides and mass murders I recently read G. K. Chesterton's book Eugenics And Other Evils and was struck by his stated motive in publishing the book in 1922:

Though most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, are conceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk of preliminary notes about the science of Eugenics were written before the war. It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies) sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilisation, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses. It may therefore appear that I took the opinion too controversially, and it seems to me that I sometimes took it too seriously. But the criticism of Eugenics soon expanded of itself into a more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialism and strict social organisation.

And then the hour came when I felt, not without relief, that I might well fling all my notes into the fire. The fire was a very big one, and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries. And, anyhow, the issue itself was being settled in a very different style. Scientific officialism and organisation in the State which had specialised in them, had gone to war with the older culture of Christendom. Either Prussianism would win and the protest would be hopeless, or Prussianism would lose and the protest would be needless. As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, it grew more and more plain that the scientifically organised State was not increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishmen would ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So I thought all I had written irrelevant, and put it out of my mind.

I am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It has gradually grown apparent, to my astounded gaze, that the ruling classes in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia is a pattern for the whole world. If parts of my book are nearly nine years old, most of their principles and proceedings are a great deal older. They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the same bullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors that have led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumph. For that reason, three years after the war with Prussia, I collect and publish these papers.

You could read my posts dealing with the reporting of the eminent American biologist - and through Darwinist - Vernon Kellogg to read that his interviews with German officers with scientific training, some of whom he knew from his college days, supports Chesterton's association of eugenics with "Prussianism,"  of course neither of them knew that many of those same officers would go on to form and become members of the Nazi Party. 

There was a lot of that kind of stuff in the intellectual and literary atmosphere as Darwinism became popular in those circles. I had noted in previous posts on the subject that George Bernard Shaw had been advocating the mass murder by gas chamber of the many millions of human beings he held to be biologically unfit to live since at least 1910, shocking and thrilling the Fabians with such statements at their meetings.*   He shared that idea with that other popular writer,  H. G. Wells, undoubtedly a Darwinist who had been a student of Karl Pearson, the student of Francis Galton and perhaps the greatest advocate of Darwinist elimination of people from the future in the late 19th century.   As I've also pointed out here,  Pearson wrote a scientific paper alleging that having Russian and Polish Jews in Britain would lead to a  biological catastrophe of exactly the kind that the Nazis claimed they were for Germany.   His research for that paper was done in collaboration with one of the major Nazi eugenicists, Eugen Fischer, someone who we know Hitler and is inner circle had read as they were developing Nazism.  

* Shaw had a bizarre relationship with Darwin, claiming to reject Darwinism because it removed his rather flaky concept of "the will" from the scheme of things while retaining and expanding exactly the worst consequence of the theory of natural selection, genocidal eugenics.   George Bernard Shaw was, before anything else, a real shithead as well as a total piece of shit.   I wonder, other than the one good comedy he wrote, how many times a year his plays are produced these days.  I wonder how many of those anyone has ever really liked instead of feeling some kind of twisted sense of conventional morality that they should pretend to like them.

Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Everbody Talking 'Bout Heaven Ain't Going To Heaven

IN A RECENT COMMENT  I used the term "real Christians" as opposed to the hoard of what the media has been training Americans to mean when they say "Christians,"  the Republican-fascist, white-supremacist, "white evangelicals" and the exotica allied with them, the "traditional Catholics."   As far as the "trad-caths" go,  I agree with what the theological writer, classicist, Orthodox writer David Bentley Hart said about them,  they don't like Pope Francis because Pope Francis is trying to be a Christian.   There is little to nothing of Jesus and, in fact, the entire New Testament in "traditional Catholicism."  There isn't even a lot of Catholicism in them apart from their disapproval of a few sexual issues WHEN IT'S OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE DOING IT, decidedly not themselves doing it,  keeping Women from ownership of their own bodies and a few other of the more regressive feature that have indisputably figured into the history of Catholicism, though not necessarily in its future*.   

First and foremost in the program of the pseud-Christians is breaking the commandments given by Jesus, to treat others as they would like to be treated, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, attend the sick and those  imprisoned, to treat aliens among them as themselves and those they count as among themselves.  They certainly don't take the message of the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man seriously - frankly, I'm not aware of any of the "Christian" churches who take that path to perdition seriously as compared to things that Jesus didn't mention in that context,  same-sex sex the top of the current hit parade of the pseudo-Christians.  

Anyone who claims that the United States is founded on Christianity is either entirely ignorant of the New Testament or they are lying RAT bastards (That's as in Roberts Alito Thomas, etc.) because it is obviously not based on the Gospel of Jesus the Epistles of Paul, James et al or, in fact, on The Law and the Prophets except as those are lied about by pseudo-Christians and others who lie about what those say.  If the United States were founded on the morality of the Bible the infamous Fugitive Slave Laws and other features of the Constitution and the early years of the country could never have been law here because many if not all of those are forbidden in The Law and against the explicit commandments of Jesus.   

I think the old rule of etiquette to not talk about politics and religion in polite society has deprived us of something we need very badly and that's to have a huge and continual brawl over Christianity,  STARTING WITH EXPLICITLY STATING THE TRUTH THAT VERY LARGE NUMBERS OF CHURCHES AND INDIVIDUALS ARE THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF CHRISTIANS.   That's true of anyone who is supporting Trump and Republican-fascism,  including a very large number if not the majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the leadership of a number of pseudo-churches and virtually every member of Congress who most often spout the word "Christian."    When the "freedom caucus" are the ones saying it the loudest, you know they are lying because lying is the first and most often prohibition in the Bible they violate constantly.   That is if it's not the Commandment against taking the Lord's Name in vain.  Or the first, all of them have put Mammon above the God of Moses and Jesus.  

So, no, I have no regrets about having used the term "real Christians" meaning those who try, sometimes fail, and try again to live by the teachings of Jesus as handed down in the Epistles and Gospels and Acts, arguably in Revelations, too.  I think we need to have an aggressive reassertion of that within Christianity and throughout the culture because, frankly,  I don't think anything but divine guidance is going to save us. 

*  Trad-Catholics are largely idiots who have watched some movies and TV shows that show Latin mass era Catholicism as seen by Hollywood and fall for it.   Being of the fading generation who actually remembers pre-Vatican II Catholicism,  it was pretty awful in a lot of ways.  Good Pope John XXIII is among the greatest of the Popes for calling the Second Vatican Council, there is nothing more important in its documents than the reform of the liturgy and Nostra Aetate.   That jerk football kicker who shot off his ignorant mouth last month attacked the reform that finally said that Jews were not responsible for the execution of Jesus,  apparently he and his ilk want to go back to the worst of medieval and pre-Hitler antisemitism.  That is something that I heard almost no one comment on until last weekend,  it should have been one of the first things noticed about him. 

Maybe This Is Why So Many Of Us Are So Unhappy

 41 Happy are those who are concerned for the poor;
    the Lord will help them when they are in trouble.
2
The Lord will protect them and preserve their lives;
    he will make them happy in the land;
    he will not abandon them to the power of their enemies.
3
The Lord will help them when they are sick
    and will restore them to health.

4
I said, “I have sinned against you, Lord;
    be merciful to me and heal me.”
5
My enemies say cruel things about me.
    They want me to die and be forgotten.
6
Those who come to see me are not sincere;
    they gather bad news about me
    and then go out and tell it everywhere.
7
All who hate me whisper to each other about me,
    they imagine the worst about[b] me.
8
They say, “He is fatally ill;
    he will never leave his bed again.”
9
Even my best friend, the one I trusted most,
    the one who shared my food,
    has turned against me.

10
Be merciful to me, Lord, and restore my health,
    and I will pay my enemies back.
11
They will not triumph over me,
    and I will know that you are pleased with me.
12
You will help me, because I do what is right;
    you will keep me in your presence forever.

13
Praise the Lord, the God of Israel!
Praise him now and forever!

Amen! Amen!

Happened to read this yesterday and it seemed especially relevant to the danger the United States is in under threat from the Trumpian Republican-fascists and, especially the threats from the Roberts Court.   Maybe I should post a Psalm every week.  Especially when my one-a-day reading comes across one that seems relevant. 

Monday, June 3, 2024

So, I turn on my computer this morning

and find out that Simps has lied about what I said at Duncan's again.   Not only him but one of the codgers there who is stupid enough to believe what he says.    They seldom bother to find out if he's lying or not so  who cares?   

Duncan's blog hit its summit c. 2005 when someone made a reference to it on the last season of the political fairy-tale show, The West Wing.   It's primarily a place for him to make some money, provide a place for a bunch of elderly guys and gals a couple of decades older than him to try to get some attention by exercising their knowledge of other peoples' wit and to grump and grouse.   Pretty much every adult who used to have the bad habit had left it before Obama was president.   I briefly went back in 2012 and decided it would never be more than that.

You can break a bad habit, though it takes character to do it and those who still go there don't seem to have much of that.   To me they are the play-left,  the eejits of Eschaton, Duncan's idea of an Athenaeum.   What in the college credentialed post-literates passes as a "brain trust" [they've called themselves one, I didn't make that up] in late stage, thoroughly eutrophic,  media-addled America.