Hate Mail

OH, THIS ONE IS EASY.  

The exact quote in its fuller context is from Marilynne Robinson's review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, alas behind a paywall at Harpers but I had quoted from it long ago so here it is:

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

I can add that since then Richard Dawkins made a number of statements that brought him from being one of the grooviest new atheists during the new atheism fad of the 00's who a number of the women of more questionable taste in guys on some of the lefty blog comment threads drooled over to having the cooties.   One of those was a defense of men who randomly hit on women who don't welcome it, and doubting that a little pedophile abuse by public school masters of the little boys they had sit on their laps did them any harm.   Another was bemoaning that Hitler had made eugenics taboo for a short while.   He was still doing a two-step on the issue as late as five years ago.

Richard Dawkins

@RichardDawkins

It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.

2:26 AM · Feb 16, 2020

For a start I'd say the success in producing biologically superior cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses  by selective breeding by humans is extremely ambiguous, conflating human determined ECONOMIC UTILITY with biological superiority.   If that were true you'd expect that when a strain of such are free to breed freely as feral animals, they'd keep the same type that the original organisms had but that is rarely the case after several generations.     It would seem that what human beings define as biological superiority,  nature begs to differ on.   

It also assumes that human beings are capable of determining which humans possess desirable traits and which should be prevented from leaving offspring.   To which I would give any number of examples of such selectively bred lines of humans in royal and other aristocratic lineages from the time of the interbreeding Pharaohs of Egypt to the Hapsburg lines of royalty, to he Windsors to such lineages as the Bush family which gave us George W. Bush and his sibs.  And against that I would post every estimable person who came from parents and grandparents who scientists explicitly said were degenerate from the time of Charles Darwin,  Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel down to today.   I've noted before that when the Nobel laureate William Bradford Shockley was promoting his racist eugenics and his loony idea of setting up a Nobel Laureate stud farm  the geneticist Richard Lewontin,  noting the average age of those who Shockley proposed breed a generation of super geniuses guaranteed that their sperm would have an elevated number of likely dysgenic mutated genes in it and so risked producing children with birth defects.   Something that the physics genius didn't seem to have considered.   I don't know how well documented Julian Huxley's adventures in sperm donation at an advanced age have been but the rumors have been around for a long time. 

I think that far from ignoring ideology,  Dawkins was promoting his ideology, his especially dodgy one of Darwinian fundamentalism, what his entire professional career, including his two-faced promotion of eugenics while pretending to oppose it, has been based in.   Eugenics was invented and became wildly successful WITHIN SCIENCE on the inspiration of the theory of natural selection.   We have the best evidence of that, the attribution of eugenics by its inventors,  Galton, Haeckel, Schallemyer, etc to their reading of On the Origin of Species.   Natural selection is not supported in the rigorous application of scientific method which, by the way,  can't be done to support the theory of natural selection because no experiment or observation has, so far, observed a new species arising through natural selection, natural selection, itself, being unmeasurable and invisible and not discernible in nature through the time it takes for a new species to arise.   The entire history of human science, of human culture is a day compared to the ages those processes took. 

Science As Permission To Do Evil

I HADN'T BEEN reading or paying that much attention to the interviews with Virginia Roberts Giuffre's ghost-writer Amy Wallace until I happened to hear some of the interview she did with Katie Couric.*  Among the horrific recounting of what Epstein and Ghizz Maxwell did to her and the other girls they trafficked this passage jumped out at me.

But because of his bizarre pseudo-scientific justifications for his behavior that he could explain, you know, he had to have sex three times a day, it was a biological necessity. And he was, he validated the reasons that he had sex with young girls that as as long as they had started menstruating, they were capable of having a baby, so they were a woman even if they were 12 years old. He had all these bizarre sort of justifications . . . 

So I listened to the full interview when I got back to my computer. 

I would agree that the theories referred to are pseudo-science except for three facts about what science is.  The idealistic definition of science as what can withstand the rigors of testing by scientific methods of careful observation, reporting measuring, analysis, peer-review and replication of either an experiment or observation,  that's not what science really is,   What science is in the real world is what gets accepted to be called science by those in the profession, in the publishing in recognized journal deputed to be scientific journals, those who pass it in peer review (an uneven if not extremely dodgy thing in itself) and gets the approval of science departments in industry, universities, colleges, etc.   In the case of the kind of junk science that Jeffrey Epstein clearly relied on to approve of his sexual degeneracy, sadism, rape and abuse of young girls - though perhaps not his taking advantage of it in his trafficking, no doubt, blackmailing and courting power through peddling or giving his blackmail on the rich, probably largely white, straight and powerful to governments and, I'll bet you anything billionaires and their financial interests.   He was just using "science" exploiting the "natural" inclinations of the straight male gender as science led him to believe was "natural" and so, OK.

So, 

1. Scientific method is not what science is in the real world because

2. Science at any given time is whatever those in the scientific establishment call "science" and 

3. A lot of that is based entirely on what universities, colleges, the publishing industry and "journalism" allows them to get away with calling "science."   

Based on that,  I think it's inaccurate to call those self-serving declarations of science that Epstein felt entitled to practice as "pseudo-science."   I agree with what Marilynne Robinson said,  if religion is answerable for bad religion then science has to be answerable for bad science - especially as so much of it exists quite contentedly within what is called science.  

There was nothing in that list from Amy Wallace that I didn't hear university faculty,  peer-reviewed, published scientists, whether biologists or those in the pseudo-social sciences say in some fashion.  Presenting what they said as falling within the expansively enfolding blanket of what science is at any given time.   I remember lots of stuff like that being said in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and have read it going back and onward from there.    Even after I very early concluded that psychology, sociology and anthropology** were pseudo-science in the later 1960s,  I paid attention to what the hucksters and snake-oil peddlers of those university and publishing ordained sciences said because their suckers were everywhere in the university and college credentialed influencers (we called them "journalists" back then, I was skeptical of that profession, as well, by then) and politicians and especially lawyers, judges and "justices" were suckers for it, especially when, just as with Epstein,  their bullshit science supported what they liked and wanted the law to mean.   

Amy Wallace talked about how even when the victims of Epstein and Maxwell went to the FBI the largely male, straight, white, affluent cops ignored what they were told.   Maybe that's because such science had seeped into the professional and institutional culture of policing too deeply for them to take such crimes seriously.   Maybe as, I have little doubt Epstein would claim, that his victims had participated in what they were doing on the basis of scientifically identified predilections on their parts - that is if anyone had ever bothered to grill the bastard on what he was doing.   I recall that kind of talk as a way to dismiss the idea that women or girls can be raped.  I remember hearing that from college credentialed males who had certainly taken the soc-sci requisites (they've got to keep their faculty doing something so they have to force students to take those bullshit courses).   I've heard of from lefty bloggers especially in the form of arguing for the reduction of the age of consent which would have, by the way, made much of the rape of Epstein and Maxwell the responsibility o the young girls they raped.  

We've paid an enormous price for the choice in the late 19th century of universities, their faculties and others in the academic racket allowing psych, soc, anthropology and,  God help us, even econ into the category of science.   I have no doubt that Epstein and Maxwell would have been as prone to rape and abuse and traffic young girls without the blessings of science but, even as they financed science, scientists, and such cultural entities as the "Scienceblogs" they used science to justify it to themselves, the naive girls they preyed on and, no doubt, others as having that blessing.  

* I'm impressed with how many who made a lot of money in the TV "news" business are doing better work on their own online.  

** I don't know how they're getting on in the profession, but I do know there are some in anthropology who started admitting what they do in no way fulfills the requirements of scientific method, though I think they're probably a small minority of those in the profession.   I strongly doubt that honest admission is going to survive because there's such a vested interest in keeping up that pretense.  

Post Script:  Re-reading this you may think that my indictment of the social sciences in permission of men to rape children is inaccurate.   A figure I've mentioned any number of times, one of the main academic figures in and supporters of Paidka, a sort of journal of those who were trying to get governments to lower or abolish ages of consent, the better to enable such men was the American sexologist, Vern Bullough.  The Wikipedia page on him, no doubt written and maintained by those who want him to be remembered well, starts:

Vern Leroy Bullough (July 24, 1928 – June 21, 2006) was an American historian and sexologist.[1][2]

He was a distinguished professor emeritus at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, Faculty President at California State University, Northridge,[3] a past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, past Dean of natural and social sciences at the Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York, one of the founders of the American Association for the History of Nursing, and a member of the editorial board of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia.[4]

And he was hardly the only figure in the social science establishment involved with that effort.   I've never made a list of those I've read about who promote that kind of science while working as acknowledged scientists but it's wouldn't be a short one if I did. 

Finally An Important Lawyer Starts To Get It

THE HONORABLE ADAM SCHIFF has broken the dam and admitted that John Roberts and the fascist five are responsible for the Trump crime wave that is engulfing the country.  They are the ones who agreed with John Sauer that Trump could kill People and no one was going to hold him culpable for it,  he's killing lots of People now, especially innocent fishermen from Latin America,  openly soliciting and taking bribes and emoluments illegally, breaking law after law in the wake of Roberts' Dred Scott level corrupt decision in Trump v USA and, who knows, could lead to a civil war bloodier than the one his clear model in Chief "justices" Taney helped bring about.   They are certainly and actively and obviously trying to bring back Jim Crow to prevent Black People and others having either proportional representation or even an ability to cast a vote and lest anyone forget,  Roberts' party,  the one on whose behalf he and the fascist five have been rigging everything for has a not insignificant faction who talking up slavery these days.   Anyone who would put Roberts and all of the other five above reinstituting slavery as a reliable bet is probably someone who was betting they would side with the unanimous ruling of that three judge panel in the appeals court instead of Sauer that Trump didn't have immunity from prosecution for committing murder.   I am pretty sure Clarence Thomas would vote to legalize it and I'm sure Barrett would find most persuasive, to herself and her fellow liars, that it was entirely keeping with "originalism." 

But I'll give you Seantor Schiff who may get farther as this goes on.   I only wish other lawyers would admit that the Supreme Court at least has become the greatest danger to equality, democracy and even the republican species of government if not the actual enemy of it that Roberts and his fascist five are.  

Irish comedian relives ordeal after release from Israeli prison

 

Israel is an apartheid state and is imitating the Nazis like the South African apartheid state did.  Imagine what they are doing to Palestinians since they treated a European like this. 

I have a sudden impending death in my family so I might not get much written for a few days. 

This Video Just Posted Has Some Vitally Important Information About The Sleazy White Supremacist-Segregationist Origins Of The "Originalist" Ideology

 

In Part 2, The Court of History’s Sidney Blumenthal & Sean Wilentz are joined by acclaimed historian and journalist Jill Lepore to discuss her book We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. They explore the book’s argument that the U.S. Constitution—far from being a static artifact—is undergirded by a history of amendment, contestation, and possibility.

Note especially her making the point I have been making for years now that the Supreme Court has been the major force in destroying all of the hard won progress made against the anti-equality-anti-reform-anti-progress forces of white supremacy,  oligarchy and male supremacy.  The Supreme Court has been the foremost anti-democratic force in our history.   She mentions some of the same books I've relied on heavily.  

I'll Point It Out Again

DONALD TRUMP has the aesthetic sense of a 6-year-old girl who's watched way too many Disney Princess movies.    One who isn't that bright.

As I heard someone say, it looks like he's gone hog-wild on Temu.  

Getting rid of this king won't do it, you've got to get rid of the kingmakers, as well.

IT'S TOO BAD TRUMP TAKES UP ALL THE ATTENTION because after he's died and gone to the place the rich man went in the parable,  John Roberts and his five fellow fascists on the Supreme Court,  the fascists who comprise 100% of the Republican caucus in the House,  those who dominate the legislatures and governorships in most states will still be there.

I've been concentrating on the worst of those,  the Roberts majority on the Supreme Court because they are the ones who rewrote the Constitution to give Donald Trump, not  only impunity for the crimes he committed in the past,  but, unasked by those who brought the case,  made him or those like him in the future into actual kings who will enjoy the ability of absolute monarchs to break the law and do terrible things without any real restraint on them.   I imagine one of those liar-lawyers on the Supreme Court bench would say that it was up to the Congress to stop them KNOWING FULL WELL THAT THE IMPEACHMENT PROVISIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION ARE AMONG THOSE DUMBEST OF ALL DUMB IDEAS THAT THOSE AMATEUR STATE FRAMERS CAME UP WITH.   Impeachment, if it was ever going to work would have worked,  certainly when Trump fomented an actual insurrection against the Constitutional order of the United States only to have their fellow Republican-fascists in the Senate - don't forget, the ones that put all of them on the court - refused to convict him despite they, themselves having been witnesses to his crimes.  

My little story about "the Bob rule" is entirely apt for the occasion,  John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas,  Neal Gorsuch,   Brett Kavanaugh (never trust a rich Catholic boy named Brett) and Amy Coney Barrett fully intended to turn the worst president this country has had, the most undeniably criminal, the most crooked,  the most adulterous (yeah, I wish someone would bring a phony test case dealing with refusal to give services to a straight, white, rich adulterer,  let's see how those trad-caths on the court do the double-step when that part of Leviticus is cited) and monumentally stupid and vulgar man to have ever been president impunity for doing the most obviously criminal things in office AND WHEN HE WAS NOT IN OFFICE.  

I was not especially surprised to see Amy Coney Barrett being interviewed by one of her fellow trad-cath-fasc goons go all Sandra Day O'Connor when even Ross Douthat seemed a little nervous about what the Roberts Republcian-fascists on the Court have given to Trump.

In an interview released on Thursday, Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Comey Barrett had to be asked twice what the nation’s highest court would do if Donald Trump turned up his nose at an adverse ruling and refused to abide by it.

In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Barrett was first asked about the extent of the president’s power over the government that has been a central tenet of Trump’s second term as his inner circle has pushed the so-called “unitary executive theory" that slots him above the legislative and judicial branches of government.

According to Trump’s last appointee to the court, who replaced the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, “It would imply strong presidential power over executive agencies. There has been a lot of debate and some new originalist scholarship debating right now whether indeed it has sound originalist credentials. But yes, it is one that has traditionally been associated with originalists.”

I'll point out again that the rather dim-witted Barrett takes refuge in the fraudulent idea that because she claims the mantle of "originalism" that that means the conclusions she pastes that label on means she isn't imposing her ideological preferences on the Constitution - ideologies are adopted OUT OF THEIR UTILITY FOR DOING EXACTLY THAT,  PROMOTING THEIR ADHERENT'S PREFERENCES.  That is true no matter what those preferences are, even those who might give some ideological school as their reason for preferring egalitarian democracy as well as those like her who favor pseudo-Christian, white-supremacist fascism of the kind she and her fellow five fascists working under Roberts do.    But these days it's only the fascists on the court who are doing that,  I have seen nothing in the three Democratic appointees on the Court which does the same thing.   As I said before,  I agree with Sheldon Whitehouse when he has expressed extreme skepticism of those who proclaim a "judicial philosophy" because of the cases I've known of,  whether it is the current wave of Republican-fascists proclaiming their "originalism" or "textualism" or whether it was Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. whose judicial philosophy was tied to his own ideology of scientism - a scientism which was already outmoded and naive at about the same time he got on the Court.   As I noted, in his case it led to one of the monuments in shameful Court decisions,  Buck v Bell, which I imagine would be decided right in line with the Republican-fascist ideological position that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution so it doesn't exist. 

She then noted that debate is currently being addressed “in some of the cases on the court’s docket now.”

Yeah, and every time one of those cases comes up it's a gamble whether anything like democracy will survive.   And it isn't only on the Supreme Court that we have to be nervous, now.    A panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has given Trump a green light to invade Portland, Oregon.   It's anyone's guess how a large bench of that Court will come down on the clearly illegal act by Trump - the original judge noted that the evidence the Trump goons presented doesn't support their case but that made no difference to the majority of the thugs who ruled that way the other day.   

This is the situation that Barrett and her fellow fascists on the Supreme Court have created out of their ideological position that the presidency is a "unitary executive."   

With that looming over the court as an avalanche of challenges to the current president are overwhelming federal courts, Douthat pointed out to the justice, “The Supreme Court does not command the power of the purse, doesn’t command the military, doesn’t have police powers. What it has, in a sense, is prestige, public support, a historic constitutional role.”

Adding, “... we’re in a moment — and we don’t have to make this specific to the Trump White House — when it’s very easy to imagine, from either the left or the right, some present or future president deciding to test the court, Andrew Jackson-style, saying: Interesting ruling, Justice Barrett. Good luck enforcing it,” he proposed, “How do you think about that potential challenge, as a member of the court?”

Admitting the NYT columnist was correct, Coney Barrett attempted, “Just as the court must take account of the consequences on the institutional dynamics, say, between a current president and a future president, the balance of power between the executive branch and the legislative branch, that of course, those same kinds of institutional concerns for the long run are ones that play a part in the court’s separation of powers decisions and always have, because they also are reflected in concerns of the constitutional structure.”

Unsatisfied with the lack of clarity in her answer, Douthat pressed, “OK, let me try that again: If a president defied the Supreme Court, what would you do?”

Coney Barrett then admitted that the court’s hands would largely be tied because there is a limited enforcement mechanism at its disposal.

“Well, as you say, the court lacks the power of the purse. We lack the power of the sword,” she conceded. “And so, we interpret the Constitution, we draw on precedents, we have these questions of structure, and we make the most with the tools that we have.”

Listen to the skank!  Burying the fact that it was she and her fellow fascists who have gotten us here,  first by enhancing the corruption of money in our politics and now with their overt pro-fascism rulings.  And hearing her, "we draw on precedents" as they have knocked down precedents going back to the post-war period POST CIVIL WAR.   And probably eariler.   I remember when the liar was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that when asked which precedents she considered finally settled, she claimed that Brown was one and the Marbury power grab was another.   Other than those there is nothing that she and her fellow fascists wouldn't knock down to make Trump the kind of dictator that he has become -UNDER, NO, BY THEIR MAJORITY OPINION - and as I've said,  if they're willing to do that for Trump imagine what they'll do for Vance.

Those who come out for No Kings events should light a fire under the Courts,  the Supreme Court especially but also the lower courts, too, because every step we have made towards fascism has been given a green light by the Courts.  Every one of them.   Trump couldn't have run if the Supreme Court hadn't nullified the provisions in the 14th Amendment banning insurrectionists from holding federal offices.   

We need to do to the goddamned courts what Trump is doing to the East Wing of the Whitehouse.   I would actually zero out their budget except for their salaries - no clerks -  and remove them to the basement of the Capitol again.   If not some dump of a rented facility.  I'd turn that fascist marble palace* they reside in into a homeless shelter or low rent housing.   I'd also make them ride the circuit and abide by rigorous anti-corruption laws on pain of imprisonment with stiff sentences.   I think that one alone would empty out the Republican-fascists from the bench because we now know at least four of them are taking big bucks from those invested in Republican fascism.

Getting rid of this king won't do it,  you've got to get rid of the kingmakers,  as well.   The Supreme Court is the source of the corruption in our government through their line of rulings starting with Buckley v Valeo right down to what those thugs are cooking up right now.   They are the authors of American fascism, replacing the republic that Benjamin Franklin warned we'd only have as long as we can keep it.  Only it was the Ivy League Law School liar-lawyers who ditched it, not The People. 

* It's actually built with marble imported from Italy during Mussolini's reign.   How appropriate that is

Someone Who Trolls Me Threw Bari Weiss' Lesbianism At Me

as if that meant something.   I've known and have commented on many hypocritical quisling faggots from Joe McCarthy Roy Cohn to  Robert Bauman to the little liar from Louisiana,  Mike Johnson.   I've even commented on a couple of other hypocritical quisling Lesbians in the past.

So Kvetch n Fetchit doesn't surprise me at all.   I look forward to see her ride CBS News down to ground zero like Sim Pickins - that network has been shit for years and years now and if those who know better than I do am right, all of the so-called "news" divisions are in their death throes.   John Oliver's piece on her last week or so is a conclusive exposure of her total fraudulence and dishonesty.   She's an aging white billionaire's idea of an edgy contrarian,  she's my idea of an example that being a gay man or a Lesbian is entirely different from being an LGBTQ+ person.   I despise them as those ready to become Kapos if their political opportunism reaches its ultimate end.