Apropos of my perennially unanswered question to atheist-materialist-naturalist-physicalists about how the brain can make structures to "be" ideas before the information telling them how to make them and that they've made the right structure is, in their model, physically present in the brain to tell it what to do, someone says "our ideas are like computer programs, they're neural circuits"..
Well, sorry, but that doesn't get you anywhere. "Neural circuits" are physical structures - that is if they're there, they are, at present, no more than a convenient metaphor for people who want to pretend that they know what ideas are when that isn't any more known than it was in the classical period. The best computer hardware in the world doesn't do a single thing without people putting information into them. Even the instructions that, allegedly, could lead to computers coming up with intelligent cogitation all on their own. Which is another interesting problem with materialism but one thing at a time.
Your desire to take it out of the meat that those whose "explanations" are "DNA" or even "natural selection" could only produce and turn us into computers might be even more clueless. I don't know what you imagine those "neural circuits" are made of. So far as I know there are no copper or silver or fiberglass wires that have been found in our brains.
If you want our most central experience of existence, both ours and the universes' existence, to be physical you still have to explain how our brains do what we experience measured in fractions of seconds, which would have to be initiated in a very real, physical form perhaps instantaneously, before there is any physical structure to embody a model of the "right idea" can be there to instruct it.
If you can't do that and I believe it's impossible to do that, the "brain only" materialist model of our minds is not only a delusion, it is entirely irrational and no one with any sense would believe it. Unless you can explain that anyone is within their rights to consider you an ideological lunatic.
I think that someday people will look at this period and think it was thwarted by an incredibly naive materialist ideology and they will shake their heads, smile condescendingly and remark how credulous we were to have bought it so long after even physics had demolished the foundations of it. Perhaps they'll look on us as benighted plutonium age dolts. I only hope that such folk will, when they introduce it into drama and fiction, will be more careful about getting the facts right. It will be a shame if they don't do a better job with history than the likes of Brecht and a myriad of lesser scribblers and comic doodlers.
Update: Naw, I know it wasn't any of them. It was nasty enough and snarky enough that I won't post it but no one from Duncan's has ever come up with anything that substantial. They're real rinky-dink radicals in their own "reality". The ban holds.
Sunday, April 23, 2017
If Socialism Is To Have Any Future It Has To Renounce It's Past - I'm Not Confident It Can Be Done Or Will Be Tried
I am reluctant to call myself a socialist anymore because what most people mean by the word isn't what I am. It never was what I was even when I called what I believe by that name. Socialism as the workers owning the means of production - instead of capitalists who steal, not only the means of production but also a large share of the wealth that workers produce - is what I believed and still believe in. What most people came to call "socialism" the government ownership of those means of production and much more is something I have never believed was a good idea.
In a different part of the text I excerpted last night from Mother Country, Marilynne Robinson's indictment of the British Class system and its results, including the official British style of elite "socialism" she said:
We must find a political and moral clarity that will enable us to address the starkest problems of survival, if the world is to have any hope. For a long time now, socialists have claimed an exceptional interest in the well-being of the generality of people, a special inclination to humanize collective life. But the history of socialism is disheartening. It is too strongly associated with repression, and these ties are too casually dismissed, for socialism to be conceded the special virtues it claims for itself.
Which you should certainly keep in mind the next time you hear someone exaggerating the accomplishments of Bernie Sanders in 2016 or the next time The Nation or In These Times claims that because a few minor offices in a few well disposed places have been won by people calling themselves "socialists". The fact is that the crimes of governments in the name of "socialism" can match those of the Nazis - crimes which continue, overtly, in places such as North Korea even as their fellow Marxists abandon a pretense of socialism as they apply the lessons they gained from their state-socialist period in centralized, efficient organization and extraction to the rule by the billionaire - Communist class. Of course, in places such as the former Socialist Union, especially in Russia, they're not even pretending to any form of socialism. It turns out, not too surprisingly, that the kind of state socialism that is both the real life phenomenon of Marxism and its minor cousins in things like British Fabianism end up with the government in service to the economic and political elite. That passage continues:
Plutonium manufacture and radioactive waste dumping are enterprises for the British government, and as good a proof as one could wish that government ownership in itself means nothing. The pattern identified by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the accumulation of capital through the destruction of wealth is fully present in Sellafield. British socialism has always been no more than the left hand washing the right, and yet for years it has compelled the admiration of American socialists, who can find nothing in their own tradition to compare to it for moral grandeur.
The American academics and writers and legal theorists who peopled the secular left did, in fact, look to the horrible British and other schools of socialism and, as Robinson so well put it,
"... the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as an advance of socialism."
And that was the non-Marxist, non-Stalinist American left. Large numbers of American leftists, and in fact the same British Socialists looked to the red-fascist dictatorships of the Soviet Union, China, various small and occupied countries as if the huge piles of bodies, the enslavement of its people, the total abolition of civil rights didn't matter as long as something they called "socialism" allegedly advanced. Of course the denouement of the Soviet implosion and dissolution into, mostly, various levels of overt oligarchic fascism and the Chinese abandonment of any pretense of socialism shows that that isn't, in fact, what they were advancing. I think that if human history continues the major lesson in that abominable form of "socialism" will be that people who are oppressed by such anti-democratic systems take generations to recover to the point where they might contemplate freedom and the common good in civil society. I will add that I am convinced that can't happen if people are brainwashed in materialism or in anything other that isn't based in a full faith in equal rights and the moral obligation to respect those.*
I don't think I'll go back to calling myself a socialist because the meaning of the word which describes my position has been totally swamped by the depravity of Marxist and other state-socialist forms. I think that in the history of applied socialism in the 20th century we have been given a lesson of what to expect of that in reality instead of Fabian sociology or other forms of academic, intellectual fantasy. I agree with what Marilynne Robinson said was what we needed:
The most difficult struggle of our civilization has been to find the means to create autonomy for ordinary lives, so that they might not be plundered or disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people. Ideas like civil rights and personal liberty come directly from this struggle, which is not terribly well advanced at best, and which is untried, failed or abandoned in most of the world.
I think another lesson, in the United States and elsewhere, is that people without the academic indoctrination needed to ignore the crimes done in the name of "socialism" don't buy anything that will endanger the autonomy of their lives, they have seen billions of people whose lives have been plundered and disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people. For all of its many faults, up until the implosion of traditional American liberalism as the secularists overtook it, the American system was better at producing that autonomy than the lauded, secular "socialism" did. That such scribbling-class folk who laud the very systems that did that and the theories that fed those systems shows how removed such self-congratulating secularist, rational, educated folk can be from the reality that is staring them in the face, such scribbling folk have been doing that for most of the past century and longer. And, yet, they wonder why they have lost credibility.
If any kind of socialism is to regain any credibility, it will almost certainly be religious in character, Christian socialism, or, perhaps, under a more general religious identity. Secularism, in the form materialists assert, was also given its test of time in the 20th century. Among its casualties is American liberalism as the promotion of equal rights and the conditions that secure those in mutual obligations to respect them.
* That Trumpian fascism, Republican-fascism is fully compatible with Putin-style fascism is no great shock. All Putin had to do to accomplish what he has is to abandon any pretense of socialism and to fully take advantage of every potential weakness and flaw in the American and other Western systems of law and government. That he was able to take advantage of the permission our secularists on the Supreme Court gave to lie and other such things is not any big surprise. When you "know" the lie, the lie will enslave you. .
In a different part of the text I excerpted last night from Mother Country, Marilynne Robinson's indictment of the British Class system and its results, including the official British style of elite "socialism" she said:
We must find a political and moral clarity that will enable us to address the starkest problems of survival, if the world is to have any hope. For a long time now, socialists have claimed an exceptional interest in the well-being of the generality of people, a special inclination to humanize collective life. But the history of socialism is disheartening. It is too strongly associated with repression, and these ties are too casually dismissed, for socialism to be conceded the special virtues it claims for itself.
Which you should certainly keep in mind the next time you hear someone exaggerating the accomplishments of Bernie Sanders in 2016 or the next time The Nation or In These Times claims that because a few minor offices in a few well disposed places have been won by people calling themselves "socialists". The fact is that the crimes of governments in the name of "socialism" can match those of the Nazis - crimes which continue, overtly, in places such as North Korea even as their fellow Marxists abandon a pretense of socialism as they apply the lessons they gained from their state-socialist period in centralized, efficient organization and extraction to the rule by the billionaire - Communist class. Of course, in places such as the former Socialist Union, especially in Russia, they're not even pretending to any form of socialism. It turns out, not too surprisingly, that the kind of state socialism that is both the real life phenomenon of Marxism and its minor cousins in things like British Fabianism end up with the government in service to the economic and political elite. That passage continues:
Plutonium manufacture and radioactive waste dumping are enterprises for the British government, and as good a proof as one could wish that government ownership in itself means nothing. The pattern identified by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the accumulation of capital through the destruction of wealth is fully present in Sellafield. British socialism has always been no more than the left hand washing the right, and yet for years it has compelled the admiration of American socialists, who can find nothing in their own tradition to compare to it for moral grandeur.
The American academics and writers and legal theorists who peopled the secular left did, in fact, look to the horrible British and other schools of socialism and, as Robinson so well put it,
"... the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as an advance of socialism."
And that was the non-Marxist, non-Stalinist American left. Large numbers of American leftists, and in fact the same British Socialists looked to the red-fascist dictatorships of the Soviet Union, China, various small and occupied countries as if the huge piles of bodies, the enslavement of its people, the total abolition of civil rights didn't matter as long as something they called "socialism" allegedly advanced. Of course the denouement of the Soviet implosion and dissolution into, mostly, various levels of overt oligarchic fascism and the Chinese abandonment of any pretense of socialism shows that that isn't, in fact, what they were advancing. I think that if human history continues the major lesson in that abominable form of "socialism" will be that people who are oppressed by such anti-democratic systems take generations to recover to the point where they might contemplate freedom and the common good in civil society. I will add that I am convinced that can't happen if people are brainwashed in materialism or in anything other that isn't based in a full faith in equal rights and the moral obligation to respect those.*
I don't think I'll go back to calling myself a socialist because the meaning of the word which describes my position has been totally swamped by the depravity of Marxist and other state-socialist forms. I think that in the history of applied socialism in the 20th century we have been given a lesson of what to expect of that in reality instead of Fabian sociology or other forms of academic, intellectual fantasy. I agree with what Marilynne Robinson said was what we needed:
The most difficult struggle of our civilization has been to find the means to create autonomy for ordinary lives, so that they might not be plundered or disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people. Ideas like civil rights and personal liberty come directly from this struggle, which is not terribly well advanced at best, and which is untried, failed or abandoned in most of the world.
I think another lesson, in the United States and elsewhere, is that people without the academic indoctrination needed to ignore the crimes done in the name of "socialism" don't buy anything that will endanger the autonomy of their lives, they have seen billions of people whose lives have been plundered and disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people. For all of its many faults, up until the implosion of traditional American liberalism as the secularists overtook it, the American system was better at producing that autonomy than the lauded, secular "socialism" did. That such scribbling-class folk who laud the very systems that did that and the theories that fed those systems shows how removed such self-congratulating secularist, rational, educated folk can be from the reality that is staring them in the face, such scribbling folk have been doing that for most of the past century and longer. And, yet, they wonder why they have lost credibility.
If any kind of socialism is to regain any credibility, it will almost certainly be religious in character, Christian socialism, or, perhaps, under a more general religious identity. Secularism, in the form materialists assert, was also given its test of time in the 20th century. Among its casualties is American liberalism as the promotion of equal rights and the conditions that secure those in mutual obligations to respect them.
* That Trumpian fascism, Republican-fascism is fully compatible with Putin-style fascism is no great shock. All Putin had to do to accomplish what he has is to abandon any pretense of socialism and to fully take advantage of every potential weakness and flaw in the American and other Western systems of law and government. That he was able to take advantage of the permission our secularists on the Supreme Court gave to lie and other such things is not any big surprise. When you "know" the lie, the lie will enslave you. .
Saturday, April 22, 2017
A Good Ear Worm For Once - Hugh Dillon - Lost at Sea
No idea why I thought of this song today. I only heard it once, in an episode of the program Flashpoint in which the incredibly charismatic Hugh Dillon plays a policeman and the incredibly powerful and way too little known Canadian actor Mpho Koaho did an amazing job of playing a young guy who was railroaded by a corrupt prosecuting attorney. That was years ago and, for some reason, the song that ended the episode keeps going through my head. A good ear worm, for once. I'm not so hot on rock of any kind but I do like Hugh Dillon and the Headstones.
Don't Bother Telling Me About It
I must say I am never interested in what someone who couldn't tell sigma from smegma has to say about peer-reviewed scientific research.
As to Radin's talks, all he was doing was talking about experiments to try to test a long standing speculation of quantum physics. Is there something wrong with that?
As to his qualifications, here are just his more recent reviewed publications.
Radin, D. Michel, L., Delorme, A. (2016). Psychophysical modulation of fringe visibility in a distant double-slit optical system. Physics Essays. 29 (1), 14-22.
Radin, D. Michel, L., Delorme, A. (2015). Reassessment of an independent verification of psychophysical interactions with a double-slit interference pattern. Physics Essays. 28 (4), 415-416.
Radin, D. Michel, L., Pierce, A. Delorme, A. (2015). Psychophysical interactions with a single-photon double-slit optical system. Quantum Biosystems. 6 (1), 82-98.
Radin, D. Schlitz, M., Baur, C. (2015). Distant healing intention therapies: An overview of the scientific evidence. Global Advances in Health and Medicine. Special Issue (November 2015): Biofield science and healing: Towards a transdisciplinary approach. 67-71.
Radin, D. (2015). Meditation and the nonlocal mind. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 1: 82-84.
Vieten, C. Estrada, M., Cohen, A. B., Radin, D., Schlitz, M., Delorme, A. (2014). Engagement in a community-based integral practice program enhances well-being. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 33.
Mossbridge JA, Tressoldi P, Utts J, Ives JA, Radin D, Jonas WB. (2014). Predicting the unpredictable: critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience;8:146. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146.
Radin, D. (2014). Out of one’s mind or beyond the brain: The challenge of interpreting near-death experiences. Missouri Medicine, 111 (1), 22- 26.
Delorme A, Beischel J, Michel L, Boccuzzi M, Radin D and Mills PJ (2013) Electrocortical activity associated with subjective communication with the deceased. Frontiers in Psycholology, 4:834. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00834
Radin, D. I., Delorme, A.., Michel, L., Johnston, J. (2013). Psychophysical interactions with a double-slit interference pattern: Experiments and a model. Physics Essays. 26 (4), 553-566.
Shiah, Y-J & Radin, D. I. (2013). Metaphysics of the tea ceremony: A randomized trial investigating the roles of intention and belief on mood while drinking tea. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 9, 355-360.
Radin, D. (2012). Psi-mediated optimism and the future of parapsychology. Journal of Parapsychology, 76 (Supplement), 45-46.
Schlitz, M., Hopf, H. W., Eskenazi, L., Vieten, C., & Radin, D. (2012). Distant healing of surgical wounds: An exploratory study. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 8: 223-230.
Radin, D. I., Michel, L, Wendland, P., Rickenbach, R., Delorme, A., Galdamez, K. (2012). Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments. Physics Essays, 25 (2), 157-171.
Radin, D. I., Vieten, C., Michel, L., & Delorme, A. (2011). Electrocortical activity prior to unpredictable stimuli in meditators and non-meditators. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 7, 286-299.
Patrizio E. Tressoldi, P. E., Storm, L. & Radin, D. I. (2010). Extrasensory perception and quantum models of cognition. Neuroquantology, 8 (4), S81-87.
Radin, D. I. & Borges, A. (2009). Intuition through time: What does the seer see? Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.
Radin, D. I., & Atwater, F. H. (2009). Entrained minds and the behavior of random physical systems. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
Radin, D. I., Lund, N., Emoto, M. & Kizu, T. (2009). Triple-blind replication of the effects of distant intention on water crystal formation. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
Radin, D. I. (2008). Superpowers and the stubborn illusion of separation. Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine, (19) 1, 29-42.
Radin, D. I., Stone, J., Levine, E., Eskandarnejad, S., Schlitz, M., Kozak, L., Mandel, D., & Hayssen, G. (2008). Compassionate intention as a therapeutic intervention by partners of cancer patients: Effects of distant intention on the patients’ autonomic nervous system. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 4 (4), 235-243.
Radin, D. I. (2008). Testing nonlocal observation as a source of intuitive knowledge. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. 4(1), 25-35.
Radin, D. I. & Lobach, E. (2007). Toward understanding the placebo effect: Investigating a possible retrocausal factor. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 13, 733–739.
Radin, D. I., Hayssen, G & Walsh, J. (2007). Effects of intentionally enhanced chocolate on mood. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. 3(5), 485-492.
Radin, D. I. (2007) Finding or imagining flawed research? The Humanistic Psychologist, 35(3).
Mason, LI, Patterson, RP, and Radin, DI. (2007). Exploratory study: The random number generator and group meditation. Journal of Scientific Exploration. 21 (2), 295–317.
Let's see theirs.
I will be adjusting my filters to keep all of that kind of stuff out, what they say is neither important nor is it interesting.
As to Radin's talks, all he was doing was talking about experiments to try to test a long standing speculation of quantum physics. Is there something wrong with that?
As to his qualifications, here are just his more recent reviewed publications.
Radin, D. Michel, L., Delorme, A. (2016). Psychophysical modulation of fringe visibility in a distant double-slit optical system. Physics Essays. 29 (1), 14-22.
Radin, D. Michel, L., Delorme, A. (2015). Reassessment of an independent verification of psychophysical interactions with a double-slit interference pattern. Physics Essays. 28 (4), 415-416.
Radin, D. Michel, L., Pierce, A. Delorme, A. (2015). Psychophysical interactions with a single-photon double-slit optical system. Quantum Biosystems. 6 (1), 82-98.
Radin, D. Schlitz, M., Baur, C. (2015). Distant healing intention therapies: An overview of the scientific evidence. Global Advances in Health and Medicine. Special Issue (November 2015): Biofield science and healing: Towards a transdisciplinary approach. 67-71.
Radin, D. (2015). Meditation and the nonlocal mind. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 1: 82-84.
Vieten, C. Estrada, M., Cohen, A. B., Radin, D., Schlitz, M., Delorme, A. (2014). Engagement in a community-based integral practice program enhances well-being. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 33.
Mossbridge JA, Tressoldi P, Utts J, Ives JA, Radin D, Jonas WB. (2014). Predicting the unpredictable: critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience;8:146. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146.
Radin, D. (2014). Out of one’s mind or beyond the brain: The challenge of interpreting near-death experiences. Missouri Medicine, 111 (1), 22- 26.
Delorme A, Beischel J, Michel L, Boccuzzi M, Radin D and Mills PJ (2013) Electrocortical activity associated with subjective communication with the deceased. Frontiers in Psycholology, 4:834. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00834
Radin, D. I., Delorme, A.., Michel, L., Johnston, J. (2013). Psychophysical interactions with a double-slit interference pattern: Experiments and a model. Physics Essays. 26 (4), 553-566.
Shiah, Y-J & Radin, D. I. (2013). Metaphysics of the tea ceremony: A randomized trial investigating the roles of intention and belief on mood while drinking tea. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 9, 355-360.
Radin, D. (2012). Psi-mediated optimism and the future of parapsychology. Journal of Parapsychology, 76 (Supplement), 45-46.
Schlitz, M., Hopf, H. W., Eskenazi, L., Vieten, C., & Radin, D. (2012). Distant healing of surgical wounds: An exploratory study. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 8: 223-230.
Radin, D. I., Michel, L, Wendland, P., Rickenbach, R., Delorme, A., Galdamez, K. (2012). Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments. Physics Essays, 25 (2), 157-171.
Radin, D. I., Vieten, C., Michel, L., & Delorme, A. (2011). Electrocortical activity prior to unpredictable stimuli in meditators and non-meditators. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 7, 286-299.
Patrizio E. Tressoldi, P. E., Storm, L. & Radin, D. I. (2010). Extrasensory perception and quantum models of cognition. Neuroquantology, 8 (4), S81-87.
Radin, D. I. & Borges, A. (2009). Intuition through time: What does the seer see? Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.
Radin, D. I., & Atwater, F. H. (2009). Entrained minds and the behavior of random physical systems. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
Radin, D. I., Lund, N., Emoto, M. & Kizu, T. (2009). Triple-blind replication of the effects of distant intention on water crystal formation. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
Radin, D. I. (2008). Superpowers and the stubborn illusion of separation. Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine, (19) 1, 29-42.
Radin, D. I., Stone, J., Levine, E., Eskandarnejad, S., Schlitz, M., Kozak, L., Mandel, D., & Hayssen, G. (2008). Compassionate intention as a therapeutic intervention by partners of cancer patients: Effects of distant intention on the patients’ autonomic nervous system. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 4 (4), 235-243.
Radin, D. I. (2008). Testing nonlocal observation as a source of intuitive knowledge. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. 4(1), 25-35.
Radin, D. I. & Lobach, E. (2007). Toward understanding the placebo effect: Investigating a possible retrocausal factor. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 13, 733–739.
Radin, D. I., Hayssen, G & Walsh, J. (2007). Effects of intentionally enhanced chocolate on mood. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. 3(5), 485-492.
Radin, D. I. (2007) Finding or imagining flawed research? The Humanistic Psychologist, 35(3).
Mason, LI, Patterson, RP, and Radin, DI. (2007). Exploratory study: The random number generator and group meditation. Journal of Scientific Exploration. 21 (2), 295–317.
Let's see theirs.
I will be adjusting my filters to keep all of that kind of stuff out, what they say is neither important nor is it interesting.
Saturday Evening Radio Drama - Jane Beeson - A Cry ... Almost A Scream
Rosemary Leach as the Woman
Maurice Denham as the Man
Hilda Kriseman as the Lunderette Assistant
Eve Karpf as the Customers
A weird little play about guilt, one of the most interesting things to me was how the woman says "The Council want me out, they want me to go". I wonder why it strikes me as a typically British thing to say, it reminds me of Marilynne Robinson saying,
There is a third option, however, described by both Smith and Marx, and, as luck would have it, indigenous to America, of a society based upon individual autonomy, to be achieved through policies of government that by act or omission enhance the specific, tangible material well-being of individual people, by creating or protecting conditions of life that enhance vigor and morale. These include education, fair wages, wholesome food and water, and reasonable hope for one's children. These things correspond in a general way with what Americans consider to be "Western values," yet they have have never described, and do not now describe, the condition of life of ordinary British people.
Interesting how a line in a play can do that, make you think of something like that. I hope that Americans faced with such a form of coercion will always have an inclination to tell such a Council to go to hell. I hope the British people develop that attitude and get rid of the stinking class system.
Second Feature - Alf Silver - Cold Storage
No Need For A Hate Mail Post
I checked, my new spam filters are working. It's as if they're dead to me. Let them rage on in their assininity among themselves, I don't care. Their fury doesn't matter as they whistle past the graveyard of materialist orthodoxy.
Consciousness and the Observer Effect | Dean Radin Ph.D | IONS
The audio is a bit fuzzy, sounds like it was recorded over Scype or something. Somehow, I have a feeling that a lot of the people trying to hijack the March for Science wouldn't like this kind of science though, as Radin pointed out somewhere, all they were doing was experimental testing of perfectly standard quantum physics. That it confirms the speculation that, other than being an illusion, consciousness is the actual substrate of physics.
My only real problem with the video is the cartoon of Galileo and the Cardinal, it was the scientific establishment of Galileo's day, who had a professional stake in the Ptolemaic system that refused to look through his telescope, not the Cardinals. Today it's atheist-materialists who refuse to consider such science as Radin engages in with more methodological rigor than many of them practice. There is virtually no psychology and quite a bit of other science that doesn't practice the same level of rigor but which is acceptable because it upholds conventional materialist ideology.
And those in the "skeptics" industry which seems to be trying to hijack the March are the most dishonest of all.
Update: Here's a somewhat shorter and much clearer video covering a lot of the same material.
Yes. The Problem Of Christianity, Its Fellow Monotheistic Faiths Is That Too Many Of Its Adherents Act Like Materialists
It is objected to that I pointed out in the update to my short post of yesterday that materialists who view humans and other living beings as mere objects, will, when desired, treat people and other living beings as objects to whom they have no binding moral obligations. The objection is that those who profess religious belief will often do the same in violation of what their religions teach as moral obligations. That so many religious believers act as if they believe what materialism holds would, I think, show more the seductions of a materialist attitude towards other people and living beings and why that is a problem. The members of religions that teach that those binding moral obligations to treat people and our fellow creatures well, who violate that are violating nothing about materialism. That they can knock over a hurdle into depravity, at times, proves that anything that encourages them to do so is dangerous and evil. And materialism encourages them to believe that those hurdles that religion and even any "ethical" system that atheists have proposed replace real morals are merely delusions, social conventions, things that, if they can get away with if and when they want to do so, they are under no moral obligation to observe or practice. They are also told that, if they can get away with it, they need fear no kind of ultimate consequence for themselves.
That you atheists can claim the fact that some religious people act as if they believe materialism is true shows that religion is bad but that atheist-materialism is superior shows that your thinking is muddled. The biggest problem with Christianity is that too many Christians act like materialists, not that they act too much in accord with the teachings of Jesus, the Law and the Prophets.
That's not the only large discrepancy between various claims rampant among atheists. For example, there are those most cluelessly self-declared "free thinkers" who, due to the requirements of their materialist ideology, must eventually deny the possibility of free thought -since all things, including thought must be due to physical causation and determined - will deny that free thought is real AND THEY DO SO IN THE NAME OF "FREE THOUGHT".
And those discrepancies and hypocrisies are on, perhaps, fullest display when materialism is expressed politically and socially.
I have mentioned how absurd it gets when such as the old-line Stalinists howled that their rights to promote Stalinism here were violated, how their First and Fifth amendment rights to promote Stalinism were violated - as they sometimes were - the man they championed not only violated those rights, he violated all of the rights of almost everyone during his reign of terror, racking up what might actually stand as a record of mass murder, terror and oppression. If you think that kind of thing is in the past, as mentioned before, you can find their like all over the lefty magazines, letter columns, blog and other comment threads right now. I had some dumb bell going on and on about how "class struggle" was the only way to gain rights and equality when "class struggle" aka Marxism has been given the test of time in reality instead of sociological-economic theorizing and speculation. Marxism leads, not to freedom, equality and a decent life, it leads to mass murder and terror, it leads to the enslavement of almost all except the elites (though those elites must often live in fear of their fellow members of the elite) it leads, in the fullness of time, to the abandonment of the pantomime of state socialism for the most vicious forms of oligarchic, plutocratic capitalism on steroids. It leads to the withering of the state as Marx predicted but only the state as any kind of guarantor of equality, freedom, civil comity and decency but not as a ruthless machine of extraction on behalf of the elites.
Marx, for whatever feelings he claimed to have had, was a materialist whose materialist system can't escape the inescapable logical end of materialism. Even with the best of intentions - intentions that are generally in short supply among those who can achieve power especially through revolution - Marxism is bound to devolve into an amoral horror show just as Nazism is. In the Putin generation of post-Marxist former-Marxists, we see that Marxists will be quite capable of promoting Nazism in the West to destroy democracy which is the only real enemy of that kind of depravity. Marxism turns out to be not only compatible with Nazism - as, perhaps, presaged in the Hitler-Stalin pact - it is its equivalent. All materialism will be, it's definitely not what will prevent depravity because it has nothing in it to do that and everything in it which encourages depravity. That is especially true when a belief in natural selection and its descendant ideologies are mixed in and sold as having the immovable reliability of science. Calling Marxism "science" was one of its big selling points, As I've pointed out before, Rudolph Hess said that Nazism was merely "applied biology".
Liberalism will never get anywhere until the Marxists and other materialists are dumped because they will always end up doing things and insisting on things that are not only counterproductive, they are incompatible with the belief that we are all equally endowed with rights and the moral obligation to practice the respect for those rights and the promotion of the welfare of everyone. Liberalism will only work if materialism is seen for the enemy of liberalism that it is.
That you atheists can claim the fact that some religious people act as if they believe materialism is true shows that religion is bad but that atheist-materialism is superior shows that your thinking is muddled. The biggest problem with Christianity is that too many Christians act like materialists, not that they act too much in accord with the teachings of Jesus, the Law and the Prophets.
That's not the only large discrepancy between various claims rampant among atheists. For example, there are those most cluelessly self-declared "free thinkers" who, due to the requirements of their materialist ideology, must eventually deny the possibility of free thought -since all things, including thought must be due to physical causation and determined - will deny that free thought is real AND THEY DO SO IN THE NAME OF "FREE THOUGHT".
And those discrepancies and hypocrisies are on, perhaps, fullest display when materialism is expressed politically and socially.
I have mentioned how absurd it gets when such as the old-line Stalinists howled that their rights to promote Stalinism here were violated, how their First and Fifth amendment rights to promote Stalinism were violated - as they sometimes were - the man they championed not only violated those rights, he violated all of the rights of almost everyone during his reign of terror, racking up what might actually stand as a record of mass murder, terror and oppression. If you think that kind of thing is in the past, as mentioned before, you can find their like all over the lefty magazines, letter columns, blog and other comment threads right now. I had some dumb bell going on and on about how "class struggle" was the only way to gain rights and equality when "class struggle" aka Marxism has been given the test of time in reality instead of sociological-economic theorizing and speculation. Marxism leads, not to freedom, equality and a decent life, it leads to mass murder and terror, it leads to the enslavement of almost all except the elites (though those elites must often live in fear of their fellow members of the elite) it leads, in the fullness of time, to the abandonment of the pantomime of state socialism for the most vicious forms of oligarchic, plutocratic capitalism on steroids. It leads to the withering of the state as Marx predicted but only the state as any kind of guarantor of equality, freedom, civil comity and decency but not as a ruthless machine of extraction on behalf of the elites.
Marx, for whatever feelings he claimed to have had, was a materialist whose materialist system can't escape the inescapable logical end of materialism. Even with the best of intentions - intentions that are generally in short supply among those who can achieve power especially through revolution - Marxism is bound to devolve into an amoral horror show just as Nazism is. In the Putin generation of post-Marxist former-Marxists, we see that Marxists will be quite capable of promoting Nazism in the West to destroy democracy which is the only real enemy of that kind of depravity. Marxism turns out to be not only compatible with Nazism - as, perhaps, presaged in the Hitler-Stalin pact - it is its equivalent. All materialism will be, it's definitely not what will prevent depravity because it has nothing in it to do that and everything in it which encourages depravity. That is especially true when a belief in natural selection and its descendant ideologies are mixed in and sold as having the immovable reliability of science. Calling Marxism "science" was one of its big selling points, As I've pointed out before, Rudolph Hess said that Nazism was merely "applied biology".
Liberalism will never get anywhere until the Marxists and other materialists are dumped because they will always end up doing things and insisting on things that are not only counterproductive, they are incompatible with the belief that we are all equally endowed with rights and the moral obligation to practice the respect for those rights and the promotion of the welfare of everyone. Liberalism will only work if materialism is seen for the enemy of liberalism that it is.
Friday, April 21, 2017
Abraham Joshua Heschel An Interview With Carl Stern - 1972 - Shortly before his death
This is an interview with Carl Stern for NBC. Can you imagine something like this on TV today? I think one of the keys to the value of the interview is that it's one person doing the interview, not a panel of "journalists".
I agree with him that it is a disaster that Americans are so ignorant of the Prophets "the most disturbing people who ever lived". If Americans did know them and took them seriously we wouldn't be in the horrible position we are in, today. His answer to "why don't you stick to spiritual issues" is especially good, he points out how radical the Prophets are, that they'd be in jail if they were around, now.
Someone should put up more of him on Youtube. I've got lots more transplanting to do.
Materialists Don't Believe Their Nonsense Themselves - Old Business Before New Business
I don't have any interest in anything alleged lefties who could read that the Holocaust should be the subject of stand-up comedy without objection say about anything. I went back and looked after I wrote about that and I didn't see that any of them questioned the idea. They're a bunch of jerks. Anyone who wasn't has obviously not stuck around there. If I have anything to say about Eschaton it will be about what Duncan Black writes, which means I'll be writing very little about it because he doesn't write much worth engaging.
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Someone has been looking into my archive and came across my challenge to materialists that I mentioned the other day.
There really isn't any question but that unless they can do the impossible, materialism, physicalism, naturalism - really all the same thing, are invalid and believing them is a superstition. The "brain only" materialist-atheists of neuroscience and cognitive-science and all of the other insertions of atheist religion into science that maintain that our minds are merely the epiphenomena, the by-product of physical structures of some kind in the organ in our skulls. They can't hold that our minds are anything but a result of those physical structures or there is something in the universe except matter and energy and - most clueless of all - the physical laws that govern them is not only real but the most basic and salient fact of human existence. And if that's the case then they will have to account for how a brain makes a new structure to be a new idea before the structure to be that idea exists in the brain. The brain has to blindly, on no information contained in the brain before that structure is there, build that structure, it has to:
- Know it needs to build a new structure
- Needs to know the nature of the structure it has to build to "be" the right idea
- It has to know how to make that structure with no information to guide it
- It has to know it has made the right structure to be the right idea. Which is particularly hard to explain because if it built the wrong structure that would be the only physical structure to "be" the idea present in the brain.
- It has to do all of that by a credibly verifiable physical process, in the real time to match the experience of thinking new thoughts. Maybe atheists think slower than other people but it would have to be mighty fast to match the normal experience of thinking.
- It would have to explain how the brain does that feat of magic hundreds, thousands of times a day, in a continual process so as to account for the experience of consciousness.
I originally figured that if they were ready to accept some kind of clairvoyance and telepathy they might salvage their "brain only" faith but I don't think that really gets them anywhere because those experiences would, also, need to be the product of physical structures so it doesn't get them out of their difficulty. If the ideas are present in the brain as something other than a physical structure, their model short-circuits, immediately.
They can slice and dice brains, make pretty color pictures all they want, unless they come up with something to explain how that happens their model can't work.
Of course, if they're right then what any of us think isn't up to us so they shouldn't be upset when people disagree with them. That they get so worked up when people don't believe what they do proves that they don't really believe it themselves. If they did they wouldn't spend their time trying to convince people they're right. There is no more obvious proof that they don't believe what they claim to know.
Update: Why do I care that they believe it? Because materialists who view other people as mere objects, that freedom, equality and the moral obligations to respect those in other people are delusions of material processes ("DNA" "natural selection" etc.) have no incentive to not be total assholes to people and other living beings if they want to be. And so many do.
-----------------------
Someone has been looking into my archive and came across my challenge to materialists that I mentioned the other day.
There really isn't any question but that unless they can do the impossible, materialism, physicalism, naturalism - really all the same thing, are invalid and believing them is a superstition. The "brain only" materialist-atheists of neuroscience and cognitive-science and all of the other insertions of atheist religion into science that maintain that our minds are merely the epiphenomena, the by-product of physical structures of some kind in the organ in our skulls. They can't hold that our minds are anything but a result of those physical structures or there is something in the universe except matter and energy and - most clueless of all - the physical laws that govern them is not only real but the most basic and salient fact of human existence. And if that's the case then they will have to account for how a brain makes a new structure to be a new idea before the structure to be that idea exists in the brain. The brain has to blindly, on no information contained in the brain before that structure is there, build that structure, it has to:
- Know it needs to build a new structure
- Needs to know the nature of the structure it has to build to "be" the right idea
- It has to know how to make that structure with no information to guide it
- It has to know it has made the right structure to be the right idea. Which is particularly hard to explain because if it built the wrong structure that would be the only physical structure to "be" the idea present in the brain.
- It has to do all of that by a credibly verifiable physical process, in the real time to match the experience of thinking new thoughts. Maybe atheists think slower than other people but it would have to be mighty fast to match the normal experience of thinking.
- It would have to explain how the brain does that feat of magic hundreds, thousands of times a day, in a continual process so as to account for the experience of consciousness.
I originally figured that if they were ready to accept some kind of clairvoyance and telepathy they might salvage their "brain only" faith but I don't think that really gets them anywhere because those experiences would, also, need to be the product of physical structures so it doesn't get them out of their difficulty. If the ideas are present in the brain as something other than a physical structure, their model short-circuits, immediately.
They can slice and dice brains, make pretty color pictures all they want, unless they come up with something to explain how that happens their model can't work.
Of course, if they're right then what any of us think isn't up to us so they shouldn't be upset when people disagree with them. That they get so worked up when people don't believe what they do proves that they don't really believe it themselves. If they did they wouldn't spend their time trying to convince people they're right. There is no more obvious proof that they don't believe what they claim to know.
Update: Why do I care that they believe it? Because materialists who view other people as mere objects, that freedom, equality and the moral obligations to respect those in other people are delusions of material processes ("DNA" "natural selection" etc.) have no incentive to not be total assholes to people and other living beings if they want to be. And so many do.
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Sam Rivers - Beatrice
Sam Rivers: Tenor Sax
Jaki Byard: Piano
Ron Carter: Bass
Tony Williams:Drums
Fuchsia Swing Song
Thanks For Calling My Attention To That Leak In The Ol' Spam Filter
Let them go on ignorantly. I used to encourage it figuring it was free, unintentional advertising, then I realized that they were so lazy and intellectually flaccid that they never read anything before reacting. I don't care, the only thing they risk is making me feel smug.
Also: The claim that "the biggest school of theology in New England is closing" would seem to be based in their ignorant and illiterate hopes. It is a minor school which has long had financial problems, it's not that old and, well, here, I know they won't read it but you might. I'm hardly an expert but it's my impression that theological study and writing is in pretty good shape.
I'll patch that leak, now.
Also: The claim that "the biggest school of theology in New England is closing" would seem to be based in their ignorant and illiterate hopes. It is a minor school which has long had financial problems, it's not that old and, well, here, I know they won't read it but you might. I'm hardly an expert but it's my impression that theological study and writing is in pretty good shape.
I'll patch that leak, now.
How Totally Fraudulent Is The Polling And Survey Industry and The Science That Pretends It's Reliable
My friend RMJ has a really good post up about the study I wrote about yesterday and much more, with a link to a Vox article which is the best treatment of it I've seen in the media. The Vox piece goes into one of the major absurdities of the methodology which, if I'd felt up to it, I should have gone into.
I ran Gervais and Najle’s conclusion by Greg Smith, who directs Pew’s polling efforts on religion. He’s not yet ready to buy it.
“I would be very reluctant to conclude that phone surveys like ours are underestimating the share the public who are atheists to that kind of magnitude,” he says.
For one, Smith says, Pew has asked questions on religion both on the phone and online and didn’t see much of a difference. You’d expect if people were unwilling to say that they’re atheists over the phone to a stranger, they’d be slightly more likely to input it into a computer. (Though Pew’s online questioning still has participants directly answer the question, instead of asking people to merely list the numbers of items they agree with. Even online, people might be uneasy answering the question.)
Also, Smith points out a weird quirk in Gervais’s data.
In one of the trials, instead of adding the “I don’t believe in God” measure to the list, the survey added a nonsense phrase: “I do not believe that 2 + 2 is less than 13.” And 34 percent of their participants agreed. Bizarre indeed. The researchers’ explanation? “It may reflect any combination of genuine innumeracy [lack of math skills], incomprehension of an oddly phrased item, participant inattentiveness or jesting, sampling error, or a genuine flaw in the ... technique,” Gervais and Najle write in the paper.
But they still think their measure is valid. When they limited the sample to people who were self-professed atheists (as measured in a separate question), 100 percent said they didn’t believe in God, which is correct. “It is unlikely that a genuinely invalid method would track self-reported atheism this precisely,” they write.
Still, more research is needed. “In time, we'll hopefully be able to refine our methods and find other indirect measurement techniques,” Gervais says. (Overall, kudos to Gervais and Najle for being forthright about their curious finding. In the past, psychologists have had incentives to avoid printing this type of contradictory finding in their papers.)
I don't know why the author would be giving them "kudos" for them publishing the obviously bogus study using an obviously bogus methodology. Really:
“I do not believe that 2 + 2 is less than 13.” And 34 percent of their participants agreed. Bizarre indeed. The researchers’ explanation? “It may reflect any combination of genuine innumeracy [lack of math skills], incomprehension of an oddly phrased item, participant inattentiveness or jesting, sampling error, or a genuine flaw in the ... technique,” Gervais and Najle write in the paper.
Notice their speculations as to why 34% of those included answered as believing that 2 + 2 is equal or greater than 13 includes the absurd notion that any adult except those who would be classified as profoundly mentally disabled and who are certainly not answering their other questions really believes that is the case. That, in itself, is so absurd as to impeach the validity of any of their conclusions. The study is bogus, the methodology is crap, the sampling - far from unproblematic if statistical validity is to be considered desirable - might be the least bad thing about it.
There would be no reason to suspect that you could draw any reliable conclusions from a study that had such a result. If some poeple answered "yes" to that question out of ignorance or "inattentiveness" or who knows why, there must have been people who answered "no" to the question out of something other than a knowledge of first-grade arithmetic. If they couldn't be trusted to give a straight answer to that question - either yes or no - then there is no reason to believe they could on any of the other questions in the studies,
But this study is going to be published in some peer-reviewed professional journal, even as it's already being taken seriously in the un-reviewed and credulous media. The whole thing is sold on the phony assertion that it is science and, so, reveals something you can rely on when the entire thing is absolutely not reliable even though they do a pantomime of doing what real science does.
The entire thing is a professionally interested con-job that will be supported by people who certainly know it is bogus through a kind of mutual professional protection con job. I doubt that there is much in the social-sciences these days, certainly not what gets a lot of buzz in the media that could fulfill any real test of rigorous review. You could ask the same of Pew or any others who do this kind of surveying.
You wonder how they could figure out how many of those answering any of their questions did so out of "inattentiveness" and, so, what rate of such invalid responses could be. I'd love to read their methodological cat's cradle reasoning as to why anyone should believe they could figure that out.
The excellent post by RMJ goes into far more and far more important aspects of this problem and its wider implications.
I ran Gervais and Najle’s conclusion by Greg Smith, who directs Pew’s polling efforts on religion. He’s not yet ready to buy it.
“I would be very reluctant to conclude that phone surveys like ours are underestimating the share the public who are atheists to that kind of magnitude,” he says.
For one, Smith says, Pew has asked questions on religion both on the phone and online and didn’t see much of a difference. You’d expect if people were unwilling to say that they’re atheists over the phone to a stranger, they’d be slightly more likely to input it into a computer. (Though Pew’s online questioning still has participants directly answer the question, instead of asking people to merely list the numbers of items they agree with. Even online, people might be uneasy answering the question.)
Also, Smith points out a weird quirk in Gervais’s data.
In one of the trials, instead of adding the “I don’t believe in God” measure to the list, the survey added a nonsense phrase: “I do not believe that 2 + 2 is less than 13.” And 34 percent of their participants agreed. Bizarre indeed. The researchers’ explanation? “It may reflect any combination of genuine innumeracy [lack of math skills], incomprehension of an oddly phrased item, participant inattentiveness or jesting, sampling error, or a genuine flaw in the ... technique,” Gervais and Najle write in the paper.
But they still think their measure is valid. When they limited the sample to people who were self-professed atheists (as measured in a separate question), 100 percent said they didn’t believe in God, which is correct. “It is unlikely that a genuinely invalid method would track self-reported atheism this precisely,” they write.
Still, more research is needed. “In time, we'll hopefully be able to refine our methods and find other indirect measurement techniques,” Gervais says. (Overall, kudos to Gervais and Najle for being forthright about their curious finding. In the past, psychologists have had incentives to avoid printing this type of contradictory finding in their papers.)
I don't know why the author would be giving them "kudos" for them publishing the obviously bogus study using an obviously bogus methodology. Really:
“I do not believe that 2 + 2 is less than 13.” And 34 percent of their participants agreed. Bizarre indeed. The researchers’ explanation? “It may reflect any combination of genuine innumeracy [lack of math skills], incomprehension of an oddly phrased item, participant inattentiveness or jesting, sampling error, or a genuine flaw in the ... technique,” Gervais and Najle write in the paper.
Notice their speculations as to why 34% of those included answered as believing that 2 + 2 is equal or greater than 13 includes the absurd notion that any adult except those who would be classified as profoundly mentally disabled and who are certainly not answering their other questions really believes that is the case. That, in itself, is so absurd as to impeach the validity of any of their conclusions. The study is bogus, the methodology is crap, the sampling - far from unproblematic if statistical validity is to be considered desirable - might be the least bad thing about it.
There would be no reason to suspect that you could draw any reliable conclusions from a study that had such a result. If some poeple answered "yes" to that question out of ignorance or "inattentiveness" or who knows why, there must have been people who answered "no" to the question out of something other than a knowledge of first-grade arithmetic. If they couldn't be trusted to give a straight answer to that question - either yes or no - then there is no reason to believe they could on any of the other questions in the studies,
But this study is going to be published in some peer-reviewed professional journal, even as it's already being taken seriously in the un-reviewed and credulous media. The whole thing is sold on the phony assertion that it is science and, so, reveals something you can rely on when the entire thing is absolutely not reliable even though they do a pantomime of doing what real science does.
The entire thing is a professionally interested con-job that will be supported by people who certainly know it is bogus through a kind of mutual professional protection con job. I doubt that there is much in the social-sciences these days, certainly not what gets a lot of buzz in the media that could fulfill any real test of rigorous review. You could ask the same of Pew or any others who do this kind of surveying.
You wonder how they could figure out how many of those answering any of their questions did so out of "inattentiveness" and, so, what rate of such invalid responses could be. I'd love to read their methodological cat's cradle reasoning as to why anyone should believe they could figure that out.
The excellent post by RMJ goes into far more and far more important aspects of this problem and its wider implications.
Comedy As A Secular False God
It is one of those things that are just known. Or are "known" to be known, or really, just required to be said that jokes are subversive, undermine power and, therefore, are a good, in themselves. But there's no evidence of that. Some despots and would be despots have attacked people and even killed people for making fun of them but that was not done out of fear, it was done out of not liking to be made fun of. Rudolph Herzog, who did a major study of jokes during the Nazi era came to the contrary position.
Contrary to a common myth, targeting Hitler using quips and jokes didn’t undermine the regime. Political jokes were not a form of resistance. They were a release valve for pent-up popular anger. People told jokes in their neighborhood bars or on the street because they coveted a moment of liberation in which they could let off a bit of steam. That was ultimately in the interests of the Nazi leadership. Consequently, the Führer and his henchmen rarely cracked down on joke-tellers and if they did, the punishments were mild - mostly resulting in a small fine. In the last phase of the war when the regime felt threatened by “dissenters,” though, this changed. A handful of death sentences were handed down to joke-tellers, though the true reason for this was rarely their actual “crime.” The jokes were taken as a pretext to remove blacklisted individuals - people the Nazis feared or detested because of who they were rather than because of what they had done. Among others, these included Jews, left-wing artists, and Catholic priests. As I show in my book, a staunch party member could walk free after telling a joke, whereas a known “dissenter” was executed for exactly the same quip.
Just where the commonly held belief that jokes had the power to bring down the powerful comes from is something I don't know if anyone ever researched. I think I've heard it mostly asserted by people in the entertainment industry, those who make money out of telling jokes and producing humor, some of which is funny, most of which isn't. I assume some of them really believe it and more really want to believe it but it's obviously not true. As I pointed out about the only people who have been destroyed by jokes are people who are vulnerable, poor people, people who are ugly or fat or unpopular, people who are stigmatized on the basis of their gender, their race, their ethnicity or their regional origin - that last one really, really hasn't worked out very well as a political tool for North-Eastern liberals or those on the West Coast in the biggest possible way. It might hurt someone in show biz or whose job depends on getting their next bit of writing sold. A campaign of derision, which is effective, might end the career of a comedian or a writer. Maybe that's where they got the stupid idea from.
There are a number of similar superstitions that we are supposed to believe in with all our hearts even though it's obviously not true. One which I've gotten huge opposition to pointing out is the myth that letting Nazis and fascists spread their hate will protect democracy - look at the Trump regime to see how well that worked out.* Since beginning to look more closely at the idea that "anything can be funny" even the most obviously unfunny things in human history I've come more and more to believe that it is more likely to undermine liberalism than to promote it.
I think the thing that got me onto this topic, this time, the slight effort of Duncan Black, shows how much of a value lazy, bored, jaded, and superficial libertarian-liberal types value their own entertainment above anything involved with the pursuit of equality and the moral obligations to treat people well. That's hard work, frequently not immediately gratifying and, so, about as unkew-el as possible. The assertion of the virtue of comedy has everything more to do with entertainment value than moral value. If Rudolph Herzog is right, jokes might, actually, be a means of dissipating political force instead of mobilizing it and, so, be something that the corporate-fascist state might well encourage, Sort of like how Pepsi has attempted to co-opt Black Lives Matter style protest as a kew-el thing that young people are into this year.
Why else could the idea that because someone calls something "comedy" or "humor" or, in the biggest lie of all "satire" have come to hold a sacralized position among those whose conventional, atheist-materialist, scientistic educations and acculturation admit to little if anything else having the status as sacred, not to be questioned, in a massive irony - not to be mocked, not to be joked about, not to be turned into a figure to be laughed into insignificance? Comedy, humor, "satire" (almost nothing called that today is actually satire) make a particularly bizarre sacred object or idol or substitute for moral good.
I think that the phenomenon of the sacralization of comedy is a symptom of a country that has been driven into stupidity by entertainment. I think, in that, the United States is catching up to class ridden Britain and the even more absurd France. The results are already bad. They will be worse.
Don't get me wrong, I adore Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert - one of their shows, alone, has more real humor and comedy and, on occasion, satire than the entire careers of the putrid Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, George Carlin and several other official gods of comedy thrown in. Only don't count on them taking down Trump. They didn't prevent him, after all. And if they went the way Duncan Black seems to want humor to go, they'd stop being funny and become a definite part of the problem.
* I'm pretty confident that load of crap was promoted by Marxists who were too stupid to understand it not only wouldn't work for them on the basis of even-stevens, the resultant legal orthodoxy would enable fascists, white-supremacists, neo-Nazis and Republican fascists. I am quite confident that the hands of the Corliss Lamont era ACLU would be all over it if that superstition were an object that could be dusted for prints. I think a lot more of what that trust-fund Stalinist jerk was financing had that idiotic motive. Though he certainly had help from other Marxists and the, mostly, secularist liberals who they easily suckered. I think Corliss Lamont, whose prime motive wasn't even to promote Stalinism -though he was about the last overt Stalinist left standing - but atheism, might serve as a key in understanding just about everything the American left has done wrong.
If there's one thing that is certain, Vladimir Putin and his fellow post-Marxist crime associates have played the American legal-political system - especially the free-speech, free press orthodoxy - entirely more skillfully than American leftists have. Those idiots are still pushing the Marxism that Putin and his buddies knew was a total failure beginning in the 1970s. If the current issues of The Nation, In These Times, and other venues of the American so-called left don't have something like that in the columns or letters, you can read them online all the time. The rump Bernie or Busters are pushing that crap in response to the Peretz-Sanders tour. I was seeing it just this morning in comment threads, Bernie-bots who were obviously as anti-Democratic as a Republican slamming Tom Peretz and the Democratic Party. Bernie isn't helping, though he's not so stupid as to believe that his elections haven't depended, entirely, on the support of Democrats in Vermont since he made that deal with them.
Contrary to a common myth, targeting Hitler using quips and jokes didn’t undermine the regime. Political jokes were not a form of resistance. They were a release valve for pent-up popular anger. People told jokes in their neighborhood bars or on the street because they coveted a moment of liberation in which they could let off a bit of steam. That was ultimately in the interests of the Nazi leadership. Consequently, the Führer and his henchmen rarely cracked down on joke-tellers and if they did, the punishments were mild - mostly resulting in a small fine. In the last phase of the war when the regime felt threatened by “dissenters,” though, this changed. A handful of death sentences were handed down to joke-tellers, though the true reason for this was rarely their actual “crime.” The jokes were taken as a pretext to remove blacklisted individuals - people the Nazis feared or detested because of who they were rather than because of what they had done. Among others, these included Jews, left-wing artists, and Catholic priests. As I show in my book, a staunch party member could walk free after telling a joke, whereas a known “dissenter” was executed for exactly the same quip.
Just where the commonly held belief that jokes had the power to bring down the powerful comes from is something I don't know if anyone ever researched. I think I've heard it mostly asserted by people in the entertainment industry, those who make money out of telling jokes and producing humor, some of which is funny, most of which isn't. I assume some of them really believe it and more really want to believe it but it's obviously not true. As I pointed out about the only people who have been destroyed by jokes are people who are vulnerable, poor people, people who are ugly or fat or unpopular, people who are stigmatized on the basis of their gender, their race, their ethnicity or their regional origin - that last one really, really hasn't worked out very well as a political tool for North-Eastern liberals or those on the West Coast in the biggest possible way. It might hurt someone in show biz or whose job depends on getting their next bit of writing sold. A campaign of derision, which is effective, might end the career of a comedian or a writer. Maybe that's where they got the stupid idea from.
There are a number of similar superstitions that we are supposed to believe in with all our hearts even though it's obviously not true. One which I've gotten huge opposition to pointing out is the myth that letting Nazis and fascists spread their hate will protect democracy - look at the Trump regime to see how well that worked out.* Since beginning to look more closely at the idea that "anything can be funny" even the most obviously unfunny things in human history I've come more and more to believe that it is more likely to undermine liberalism than to promote it.
I think the thing that got me onto this topic, this time, the slight effort of Duncan Black, shows how much of a value lazy, bored, jaded, and superficial libertarian-liberal types value their own entertainment above anything involved with the pursuit of equality and the moral obligations to treat people well. That's hard work, frequently not immediately gratifying and, so, about as unkew-el as possible. The assertion of the virtue of comedy has everything more to do with entertainment value than moral value. If Rudolph Herzog is right, jokes might, actually, be a means of dissipating political force instead of mobilizing it and, so, be something that the corporate-fascist state might well encourage, Sort of like how Pepsi has attempted to co-opt Black Lives Matter style protest as a kew-el thing that young people are into this year.
Why else could the idea that because someone calls something "comedy" or "humor" or, in the biggest lie of all "satire" have come to hold a sacralized position among those whose conventional, atheist-materialist, scientistic educations and acculturation admit to little if anything else having the status as sacred, not to be questioned, in a massive irony - not to be mocked, not to be joked about, not to be turned into a figure to be laughed into insignificance? Comedy, humor, "satire" (almost nothing called that today is actually satire) make a particularly bizarre sacred object or idol or substitute for moral good.
I think that the phenomenon of the sacralization of comedy is a symptom of a country that has been driven into stupidity by entertainment. I think, in that, the United States is catching up to class ridden Britain and the even more absurd France. The results are already bad. They will be worse.
Don't get me wrong, I adore Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert - one of their shows, alone, has more real humor and comedy and, on occasion, satire than the entire careers of the putrid Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, George Carlin and several other official gods of comedy thrown in. Only don't count on them taking down Trump. They didn't prevent him, after all. And if they went the way Duncan Black seems to want humor to go, they'd stop being funny and become a definite part of the problem.
* I'm pretty confident that load of crap was promoted by Marxists who were too stupid to understand it not only wouldn't work for them on the basis of even-stevens, the resultant legal orthodoxy would enable fascists, white-supremacists, neo-Nazis and Republican fascists. I am quite confident that the hands of the Corliss Lamont era ACLU would be all over it if that superstition were an object that could be dusted for prints. I think a lot more of what that trust-fund Stalinist jerk was financing had that idiotic motive. Though he certainly had help from other Marxists and the, mostly, secularist liberals who they easily suckered. I think Corliss Lamont, whose prime motive wasn't even to promote Stalinism -though he was about the last overt Stalinist left standing - but atheism, might serve as a key in understanding just about everything the American left has done wrong.
If there's one thing that is certain, Vladimir Putin and his fellow post-Marxist crime associates have played the American legal-political system - especially the free-speech, free press orthodoxy - entirely more skillfully than American leftists have. Those idiots are still pushing the Marxism that Putin and his buddies knew was a total failure beginning in the 1970s. If the current issues of The Nation, In These Times, and other venues of the American so-called left don't have something like that in the columns or letters, you can read them online all the time. The rump Bernie or Busters are pushing that crap in response to the Peretz-Sanders tour. I was seeing it just this morning in comment threads, Bernie-bots who were obviously as anti-Democratic as a Republican slamming Tom Peretz and the Democratic Party. Bernie isn't helping, though he's not so stupid as to believe that his elections haven't depended, entirely, on the support of Democrats in Vermont since he made that deal with them.
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
SAM RIVERS, Mellifluous Cacophony
Sam Rivers, tenor saxophone
Ron Carter, bass
Joe Chambers, drums
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet
Herbie Hancock, piano
Hope
Sam Rivers, Tenor sax
Andrew Hill, piano
Walter Booker, bass
J.C. Moses, drums
This Is So Easy Even Someone Sick As A Dog Can See The Problem With It
I was asked to comment on a story in the news, that a couple of University of Kentucky Psychologists are claiming that the number of atheists in the United States, which other surveys have estimated at approximately three to ten percent* but which these guys are saying might be as high as 26%. Well, instead of looking at Huffington Post or Democratic Underground, I looked at the preprint of the as yet unpublished article and the thing is so obviously bogus and so obviously designed to allow these people to make a big splash that anyone who takes it seriously only proves how credulous they are.
For example, take a gander at their "Genera Procedure" from which they "indirectly inferred atheism rates using unmatched count technique".
General Procedure
For both samples, we indirectly inferred atheism rates using the unmatched count
technique (e.g., Dalton, Wimbush, & Daily, 1994; Raghavarao & Federer, 1979),
a tool for inferring base rates of socially sensitive outcomes. The unmatched count technique indirectly infers underlying base rates for socially undesirable or unacceptable outcomes by randomly assigning participants to one of two versions of a count task. In one version participants indicate how many innocuous statements from a list (e.g., I can drive a motorcycle; I exercise regularly) are true of them. In the other version, participants receive a list that is identical, save for the addition of one sensitive item (e.g., I can drive a motorcycle; I exercise regularly; I smoke crack cocaine), and they indicate how many items are true of them. Crucially, nobody indicates which specific items are true of them, only how many in total. The difference between the aggregate rates in these conditions can presumably be attributed to the addition of the socially sensitive item. In using this task to indirectly measure atheist prevalence, our approach mirrors recent working using the unmatched count technique to indirectly estimate the size of the LGBT community as well as antigay sentiment (Coffman, Coffman, & Ericson, 2016). Crucially, this work includes extensive validation of the task’s utility in estimating the size of stigmatized groups, finding that the UCT does not appear to be driven by inattentive or random responding, and only generally diverges from self-reports of socially undesirable attributes (but not generic foil attributes). The task appears robust as well to participant inattentiveness and random responding (Coffman et al., 2016)
------
They claim their method "indirectly infers underlying base rates for socially undesirable or unacceptable outcomes by randomly assigning participants to one of two versions of a count task". Also note that they seem to be able to make it measure both the size of the LGBT community AND anti-gay sentiment. Which would seem to me to be quite a feat, considering the entire things is based on inferences based in just what the researchers claim to want to see in their "data". That is anything but an unproblematic or reliable procedure.
Do atheists consider their atheism socially undesirable or unacceptable? I certainly have never gotten the impression that atheists in 2016 or even earlier feel that way. What do the authors of the study base that in? So, right off, even if you're credulous enough to take their methodology seriously - and I certainly don't - they might be basing their inference on a false assumption. You couldn't possibly even begin to apply that without first finding out what percentage of atheists feel that their atheism is "socially undesireable or unacceptable". Why not assume what you've found are members of religious minorities who might feel that atheists might be more approved of than they are. After all, if the methods that measure atheists as 3 or even 10% of the population are unreliable, then those measuring social disapproval of atheism in the general population - what that often heard whine that atheists are a persecuted minority are based in - must be as unreliable.
My first question before reading the pre-print was why so many atheists were claimed to be such liars? Now I know that they had nothing to base any of it on.
You wonder why atheists, after the past two decades of neo-atheist agitation, answering a poll in which their participation was anonymous would demonstrate a feeling that they would be shunned by answering the question directly.
If you want to press this there are other big, really big problems with the study which I could write about. And since the news stories don't seem to even be based on the claims of the authors but in some vague feeling as to what they said, they're even more bogus. They are click bait, nothing more.
All of this stuff, even those things that ask direct questions of opinions are based on the absurd faith that a. people respond honestly, b. people know the answer to what they are asked ,c. that if you asked them the same thing two weeks later that you would still get the same results and a myriad of other unfounded parts of the sociological faith system, but none of them is reliable and none of them can really give you reliable results. Social science (so called) has, after all reported absurd figures in which men claim to have had sex with more women than women have had sex with men and claimed that told you something about the population at large when that result is mathematically impossible. Yet they still report it and other "social scientists" whose training should have included a knowledge of mathematics sophisticated enough for them to know that result is impossible have based more "science" on such stuff.
It's all of entirely unknowable reliability. For all any of us knows the actual figure is 33% or .3%. It ain't rocket science, it ain't the far harder biological sciences - those which still are science, this is entirely outside of science which shows that merely pantomiming the methods of science doesn't produce science when the subject can't be honestly studied with them.
* When I've looked at these things in the past, they ususally had to really twist things to come up with the higher percentages.
Update: You have to wonder, if these two psychologists based at the University of Kentucky had claimed that atheists were only a percent or fewer of the population, what the articles at Huffington or Democratic Underground would be saying about it. I suspect they would not have read the article but they would deride it as originating in Kentucky. The authors would be trashed, made a joke. You have to wonder what percentage of social sci-guys feel that such a study would be "socially sensitive" and what effect that would have on their "science".
For example, take a gander at their "Genera Procedure" from which they "indirectly inferred atheism rates using unmatched count technique".
General Procedure
For both samples, we indirectly inferred atheism rates using the unmatched count
technique (e.g., Dalton, Wimbush, & Daily, 1994; Raghavarao & Federer, 1979),
a tool for inferring base rates of socially sensitive outcomes. The unmatched count technique indirectly infers underlying base rates for socially undesirable or unacceptable outcomes by randomly assigning participants to one of two versions of a count task. In one version participants indicate how many innocuous statements from a list (e.g., I can drive a motorcycle; I exercise regularly) are true of them. In the other version, participants receive a list that is identical, save for the addition of one sensitive item (e.g., I can drive a motorcycle; I exercise regularly; I smoke crack cocaine), and they indicate how many items are true of them. Crucially, nobody indicates which specific items are true of them, only how many in total. The difference between the aggregate rates in these conditions can presumably be attributed to the addition of the socially sensitive item. In using this task to indirectly measure atheist prevalence, our approach mirrors recent working using the unmatched count technique to indirectly estimate the size of the LGBT community as well as antigay sentiment (Coffman, Coffman, & Ericson, 2016). Crucially, this work includes extensive validation of the task’s utility in estimating the size of stigmatized groups, finding that the UCT does not appear to be driven by inattentive or random responding, and only generally diverges from self-reports of socially undesirable attributes (but not generic foil attributes). The task appears robust as well to participant inattentiveness and random responding (Coffman et al., 2016)
------
They claim their method "indirectly infers underlying base rates for socially undesirable or unacceptable outcomes by randomly assigning participants to one of two versions of a count task". Also note that they seem to be able to make it measure both the size of the LGBT community AND anti-gay sentiment. Which would seem to me to be quite a feat, considering the entire things is based on inferences based in just what the researchers claim to want to see in their "data". That is anything but an unproblematic or reliable procedure.
Do atheists consider their atheism socially undesirable or unacceptable? I certainly have never gotten the impression that atheists in 2016 or even earlier feel that way. What do the authors of the study base that in? So, right off, even if you're credulous enough to take their methodology seriously - and I certainly don't - they might be basing their inference on a false assumption. You couldn't possibly even begin to apply that without first finding out what percentage of atheists feel that their atheism is "socially undesireable or unacceptable". Why not assume what you've found are members of religious minorities who might feel that atheists might be more approved of than they are. After all, if the methods that measure atheists as 3 or even 10% of the population are unreliable, then those measuring social disapproval of atheism in the general population - what that often heard whine that atheists are a persecuted minority are based in - must be as unreliable.
My first question before reading the pre-print was why so many atheists were claimed to be such liars? Now I know that they had nothing to base any of it on.
You wonder why atheists, after the past two decades of neo-atheist agitation, answering a poll in which their participation was anonymous would demonstrate a feeling that they would be shunned by answering the question directly.
If you want to press this there are other big, really big problems with the study which I could write about. And since the news stories don't seem to even be based on the claims of the authors but in some vague feeling as to what they said, they're even more bogus. They are click bait, nothing more.
All of this stuff, even those things that ask direct questions of opinions are based on the absurd faith that a. people respond honestly, b. people know the answer to what they are asked ,c. that if you asked them the same thing two weeks later that you would still get the same results and a myriad of other unfounded parts of the sociological faith system, but none of them is reliable and none of them can really give you reliable results. Social science (so called) has, after all reported absurd figures in which men claim to have had sex with more women than women have had sex with men and claimed that told you something about the population at large when that result is mathematically impossible. Yet they still report it and other "social scientists" whose training should have included a knowledge of mathematics sophisticated enough for them to know that result is impossible have based more "science" on such stuff.
It's all of entirely unknowable reliability. For all any of us knows the actual figure is 33% or .3%. It ain't rocket science, it ain't the far harder biological sciences - those which still are science, this is entirely outside of science which shows that merely pantomiming the methods of science doesn't produce science when the subject can't be honestly studied with them.
* When I've looked at these things in the past, they ususally had to really twist things to come up with the higher percentages.
Update: You have to wonder, if these two psychologists based at the University of Kentucky had claimed that atheists were only a percent or fewer of the population, what the articles at Huffington or Democratic Underground would be saying about it. I suspect they would not have read the article but they would deride it as originating in Kentucky. The authors would be trashed, made a joke. You have to wonder what percentage of social sci-guys feel that such a study would be "socially sensitive" and what effect that would have on their "science".
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