O Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.
The Choir of St John's College, Cambridge
The way she set the words and the sun of justice makes me hold my breath it's so beautiful.
IN the future I'm not answering Darwin's Defenders unless they bring up something I haven't written about many times already. I may just post links to the posts I've written when they whine about things I have answered many times or I may just ignore them.
If Darwinism hadn't reared its ugly head in the Trumpian and Swedish eugenics approach to Covid-19, I probably wouldn't have posted what I did this morning. I think any honest person, reading those things I cited or alluded to this morning, especially those things Darwin, himself wrote, what his children said about him, would come to the same conclusion about these matters that I have. I'm not the only one who did, as I said Frances Cobbe, an intelligent reader and actual associate of Darwin and his wife came to those conclusions in the 1860s and early 70s and she was hardly the only one who did. And she didn't have the benefit of the subsequent history of Darwinism to form her conclusions from.
AH, yes, the never-ending need of uncovering the cover story as ass-covering given to Darwinism, starting with ol' Chuck, himself "Social Darwinism".
When I started my investigation of the question as to whether or not the post-WWII line I'd been taught in school were true, that Darwin was neither responsible for nor guilty of eugenics, as soon as I looked into the actual words of Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, especially the fifth and sixth editions prepared by Darwin and published before his death and even more so in The Descent of Man, I saw that far from being distanced from the eugenics that his cousin and colleague Francis Galton was formalizing into the trappings of science, he was Galton's most desired and definitive champion in that effort. I know that because a. Francis Galton in his memoir SAID THAT HIS INSPIRATION IN INVENTING EUGENICS WAS HIS READING OF ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, b. Galton said that his cousin, Charles Darwin's approval was the thing he most sought and c. he published his cousin's letter lavishly praising and approving of Galton's eugenics in his memoir.
The most important aspect of that isn't Galton's definitive proof that Charles Darwin approved of eugenics it is the confirmation that he approved of it by Darwin citing Galton's earliest journal articles and the first book laying out eugenic theory, Hereditary Genius, as reliable science INCLUDING THE APPLICATION OF THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION AS APPLIED TO PRESUMED INEQUALITY WITHIN THE HUMAN SPECIES.
As to the dodge that it was the putrid English philosopher Herbert Spencer who corrupted Darwinism with "Social Darwinism" through his slogan "survival of the fittest," in his fifth edition of Origin of Species, Darwin, at the urging of A. R. Wallace, his co-inventor of natural selection, came right out and admitted that when he used the term "natural selection" he meant the exact same thing as Spencer did when he said "survival of the fittest". Nothing I have seen, whether published by Darwin in the remainder of his life nor in letters that have since been published did I see a single thing that repudiated that statement, every single word that I read by him or idea attributed to him by his children, his scientific colleagues reinforced the fact that he was a total and complete supporter of even extreme eugenic proposals, though he did hold the line at advocating contraception which he felt was icky and might lead women to enjoy sex too much. I'm not making that up, he actually said that in a letter to the eugenicist Gaskell (look it up in my archive). In that letter he also advocated that Britain, around the world, practice what Hitler would a few decades after he died called "Lebensraum" in which Brits would replace the inhabitants of other countries and continents through the elimination of the native population.
Anyone who had done the first thing necessary to find out the truth of the matter only had to honesty read the words of Charles Darwin presented as valid science in his two major works on the topic to see that Darwin not only approved of Galton's eugenics, he also approved of the even more extreme advocacy of applying natural selection to the human species found in his foremost German friend, colleague and disciple, Ernst Haeckel who included rigid rankings of human fitness along racial lines and everything up to and including advocating murder to correct the inhibition of natural selection in the human species of those "scientifically" deemed to be inferior, whether due to their class ranking within racial and national groups or, indeed, among so-called racial and national groupings. That was something that Darwin approved to the extent that he said in his introductory section of On The Descent of Man that if he had known Haeckel was writing The History of Creation before he had gotten much of Descent of Man finished, he would not have finished his book because he approved of what Haeckel said in it so highly.
I have been pointing these things out here, on this blog for the past eight years and in other places since 2006. I don't see any evidence that most college credentialed Americans or Brits are really interested in reading Darwin anymore than they're really interested in reading much else by way of primary documentation, preferring to get the condensed con-dunced versions of it whether in print or as seen on cable TV and, alas the BBC and PBS.
The eugenics-free Darwin is a post-WWII myth invented as the world had the consequences of a belief in natural selection, eugenics, put in front of their eyes and their consciences in the death camps of the Nazis. I found absolutely no one who knew Darwin or who called themselves Darwinists in the pre-WWII period who distanced Darwin and natural selection from eugenics. I concluded from my years of study of the matter that it is impossible to maintain a belief in the ideology of natural selection and prevent eugenics at the same time and, I'm happy to say, that the more I read and studied the claims of natural selection the less and less I believed it was a plausible scientific theory. I think if the eugenicist and scientific racist R. A. Fischer had not trimmed natural selection and rudely glued it to the now rather quaint notions of genetics current in the 1920s and 30s, it would have been totally obliterated in the discrediting of its far more fastly affixed form, eugenics in 1945. The post-war lie of the non-eugenics Darwin was a salvage operation, one which I think was primarily motivated by ideological, not scientific necessity. It depended on the primary sources not being read, something that was more likely to not happen in an ink on paper intellectual environment, one which the primary documentation being easily available from non-ideological sources online, much of it in easily searchable form, less likely. I suspect that many of us curious about the actual status of many of these bits of common intellectual lore find our job of looking at the primary material far more possible. The sources I've looked at are now available to anyone with an internet hook up. I'd never have found even many of the most important ones proving the link of natural selection to the Nazi genocides, in both English and German if I had to rely on a library of books. The protection of paper for that and other lies is over, it now merely relies on the laziness and dishonesty of the allegedly educated.
I'm not a geneticist nor even an evolutionary biologist but I can read with some comprehension and I do find the statements of a number of eminent biologists who are challenging the neo-Darwinian synthesis of Fisher et al even to the extent that several of them have declared it dead convincing. I think it's time for them to get ready to leave natural selection on that enormous bone yard of discontinued science, one which is already rather full due to past attempts of the social sciences to mimic Darwinism, extending his natural selection to ever stupider applications. In this pandemic we have seen several economists claiming the mantle of Darwinism as they advised the disastrous policies that have led the Trump regime to get many tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans and many Swedes killed. I have no doubt that Darwin was responsible for peddling the idea of beneficial deaths, certainly by passively doing nothing to provide for those who were deprived of sustenance and medical care (he said that universal vaccination and medical care kept too many of the "unfit" alive) an idea that English, German and other exponents of natural selection have adopted and championed. It was something his theory was criticized for almost from the beginning, something he condescendingly and sexistly brushed aside when the astute Frances Cobbe pointed out would lead to terrible consequences. Well, the next hundred and fifty years would prove her right and Darwin wrong on that account. Something Darwin certainly knew at the time since he advocated men of science who advocated exactly the things that Frances Cobbe said were the consequence of believing in natural selection.
Look at my archive, I've written all of this up with links and citations to primary source materials. But I know you won't read it. You guys aren't really interested in the historical record, you're just interested in your preferred story line.
If you liked Callie Crossley's program linked to below, I found Mike Wilkins' Soundcloud site where you can listen to a number of his Christmas complations of off-beat Christmas music. Everything from the good and hilarious to the hilariously awful. I hope this turns into a Christmas tradition for me. I hope you get as many chuckles and groans from it as I have.
From the great Callie Crossley
It's our annual spinning of holiday tunes with our own Mike Wilkins, radio engineer for PRX's and GBH's "The World."
All this hour, GBH’s intrepid holiday music collector shares his new finds of old songs that are quirky, weird, and just a little bit extra. These are not the traditional carols from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or even new traditional favorites like Mariah Carey’s "All I Want For Christmas Is You." Nope, for his annual collection of songs you never heard of, Wilkins has once again rescued vinyl one-hit-wonders from the forgotten bins of overlooked B-sides, and highlighted a few new tunes that might become classics. And this season — his 31st year of Jinglebell melodies — Wilkins' collection gives a nod to 2020’s overwhelming impact.
Recently resisting the temptation of getting into it with some online idiot atheists over the bullshit of the phony expertise of the professional atheist Richard Carrier, I was reminded that one of his critics said what he did was a revival of the long discredited mythological theories of the late Victorian - "expert" James George Fraser in his masterwork, The Golden Bough. The Carrier fan boys were arguing the non-existence of Jesus, an important myth and fervent wish in current atheism which is immune to scholarly or academic refutation.
I was trying to remember which of my school English composition textbooks listed The Golden Bough as a standard reference work, along with much better and reliable works, Webster's Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, Bartlett's Familar Quotations. By the time that had happened in the 1960s, Fraser's work was, in fact, taken as everything from bogus to seroiusly outdated. I think it was the one we were given in eighth-grade but I couldn't swear to it.
In looking into it the past couple of days I was interested to find out that a lot of what Fraser claimed was clearly based on his anti-Christian motives, his desire to make Christianity seem weird to discredit it and that that was, actually, suspected of that as early as the 1890s. He was heavily criticized even during his active career by others in the same field though, despite that and despite what becomes clear as his motive in claiming what he did, his books were published and were made into standard reference works by the choice of the academics who wanted to use them that way. I suspect a lot of the pop-scholarship bullshit, especially that of the neo-atheists are based in bogus scholarship which was, in fact, ideologically motivated in the direction it took and the choices made in its construction. And a lot of that acceptance was made knowing the deficiencies that were exposed by the critics, many of them having at least the same level of credibility as the one the experts chose to anoint with the authority of a "standard reference".
Richard Carrier's motives are clear, he doesn't really care about the truth of what he's claiming, all he wants to do is peddle his ideology for his own fame and profit. He's really no different from that old liar I wrote about earlier this week, James Randi. I do think there is a real difference in reliability between people who believe in sin and that it is a sin to tell a lie and those who don't believe in sin. With them, it's all a matter of what they can get away with and in the general culture of atheist materialism, the answer is, if they like what you're saying, you'll probably never have to pay any price for saying it. Or at least not much of one. Randi's atheist fan boys never left him, no matter how he was exposed as a liar, a cheat, a eugenicist or as a guy who engaged in, at least, phone sex with underage minors. I'd expect that if there are people arguing about these things in the future, crap that the forgotten Randi peddled will still be being brought up. Common received wisdom is often only common and received.
I am, by the way, entirely skeptical of all of anthropology, my skepticism climbing enormously when it's claimed to be science. It's not. Its methods and practices produce something more honestly called "lore" and if they admitted to that it would be far safer and far more unobjectionable, or it would be if they cut the bigotry, racism and other malignant motives from it which are, in most cases, ubiquitous in that literature.
AS I mentioned I'm having eye trouble, which is why I haven't been relying on using things I have to type out. I really had wanted to use more of Sr. Verna Holyhead's commentary for Advent but typing while reading hasn't been easy. I recommend her books that have commentary for the Sunday readings of the current Catholic lectionary cycle. It's good to read several different commentaries on the Scriptures because a lot of these people who have lived with the Scriptures can suggest things in them that we beginners are liable to not notice. You don't have to agree with everything they conclude but it is helpful to have other points of view to think about. Doing so in the small weekly or daily bites you get from the lectionary of different denominations is a good way to do it. I also recommend the online commentary of Fr. Scott Lewis at the Canadian journal Catholic Register, NOT to be confused with the right wing outfit that goes by a similar name but is far less worthwhile reading in its right-wing ideological polemics.
Recently from reading RMJ's excellent and far more consistent Advent posts I'm led to thinking more and more about how much of what we think of as "objective knowledge" is really the creation of explanatory stories, how much of life, how much of human experience is too complex to fit into the confines of the reliable physical sciences or, even more so, within equations. The demotion of "story-telling" is both unwarranted and, in some cases, a warranted practice.
In some of that most important and controversial rejection of story telling, which I approve of completely, is the Stephen Jay Gould-Richard Lewontin identification of Sociobiolgy and evolutionary psychology as relying on "just-so stories." Those two innovations in evolutionary biology of the 1970s were, in fact, the creation of creation myths peddled as hard science when they were ideological in their motivations and the start of an extremely dangerous repeat of the earliest and most dangerous aspect of Darwinism, eugenics. The current eugenics, everything from the most banal seeming of assumptions of human inequality to the criminal application of it during the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden and under the Trump regime is just the latest reminder that eugenics kills people in large numbers, whether it be the active type that sends people to gas chambers or the passive type that just lets "nature take its course" with the least among us.
That those two astute biologists did, in fact, hit that neo-eugenic ideological effort at its core practice, making up stories where actual observation was impossible, so quickly was due to the fact that all of Darwinism and way too much of the scientific study of evolution was inevitably dependent on making up stories, scenarios, which, happening in the lost past, a past known by the most fragmentary of physical evidence of severely limited evidentiary value of what lives from hundreds of thousands to millions to even billions of years ago could have been.
Since Darwin's natural selection was adopted as the controling ideological feature of evolutionary and other biology, as it was adopted in the even less reliably scientific of science, the creation of explanatory stories has, in fact, been adopted in place of the more properly scientific practice of observing nature, measuring it reliably and reporting the conclusions derived from a strictly limited adherence to the observation and the measurements of what was studied. That is impossible when trying to study the lost past.
The fact that all of psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. and much of evolutionary biology has been a cycle of rapid promotion of claims, their acceptance, their establishment as orthodox holdings only to have their claims corrode under further study at a remarkably fast rate is based in the fact that a story cannot substitute for the close observation of actual events and physical objects. And even when you have living beings before you you cannot really go beyond what you can see, if you bite off more than you really can chew and make over-ambitious claims about that, the limits of your observation has a way of coming back to haunt you. That is the ghost haunting the life sciences, one which the materailists refuse to admit is there. Stubbornly refusing to come clean that what they're doing really isn't much like what physics did in its, perhaps past, productive heights and what chemistry does.
In a recently made comment I noted how much of what we do as intellectual culture is, in fact, the construction of stories, story-lines, narratives, development of themes - for more honest and less honest and straight forward purposes. I once read a rather whiny classics professor (I admit I detested the old fart) complaining about how the themes he'd developed in one of his classes were incompatible with more recent and rigorous historical conclusions. The fact is that all of history, that which is rigorous and inclusive of primary documentation and all of the less honestly done history, is based in the construction of stories, the presentation of condensed stories about the human past that we cannot go back and reproduce in all of its enormous complexity and depth. We cannot possibly access that even though there is enormously more evidence for much of that past time. The difference in what is presented about the human past can be everything from innocuous and minor to major and dangerous. In the United States two of the most dangerous and damaging and dishonest narratives of the past are what can be generally called the "Lost Cause" mythology about the American South and the "Old West" nonsense about the history of white people in the Western states. Both of those are elaborately constructed lies made for a number of purposes. One of the most effective means of doing that is the desire of movies, cheap novelists, story scribblers and typists to peddle lies for easy sale and to promote a right-wing, inegalitarian ideology. So, not that different from the motives behind evolutionary psychology and natural selection.
The fact is that even the present requires that we invent stories to explain the world to us, especially when we don't have direct access to something that makes what really happens more directly known. While that story making can be done badly, on partial knowledge or very badly for malign purposes makes it all the more important that we admit what we're doing and more critical about the stories that, especially, TV, the movies, books, the internet tell us. For me one of the most important things in that is to always be on guard for the possibility of harm coming from them and the feature of attractive, seductive dishonesty that is so often done for the purpose of leading us to evil useful to the one telling the story.
This isn't an easy subject to think about but, face it, we're stuck with it because it's what we do as human beings, admit it or not. And if there's one thing we don't want to do, whether we're someone like me, a low placed, unimportant and marginal participant in life or a highly placed academic or scientist, it's admit that we're making up stories. I suspect that this is something I'm going to increasingly think about.
O clauis david & septrum domus Israel, qui aperis & nemo claudit, claudis & nemo aperit, veni & educ uinctum de domo carceris sedentem in tenebris et in umbra mortis.
O clauis dauid, of whom Isaias tolde,
Hote septure & key, to eche look welle mett
Of Israelle – I meane of Iacobus howsholde –
Thowe opynyst lokes whiche no wyghte can shett,
And closist a-geyn þat cannott be vnshett;
Lowse vs, þi presoners, boundene in wrechidnesse,
Off synne shadowed with mortalle derknesse
O Clavis David, of whom Isaiah told,
Called sceptre and key, to every lock well fit
Of Israel – I mean of Jacob’s household –
Thou openest locks which no creature can shut,
And closest again what cannot be unshut;
Loose us, thy prisoners, bound in wretchedness
Of sin, shadowed with mortal darkness.
Music: Katy Lavinia Cooper
Words: Fifteenth Century, (British Library Harley 45), with thanks to Eleanor Parker - http://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk
Solos: Sarah Mills, Lindis Kipp, Moira McKenzie & Catriona Downie
This Middle English translation is preserved in a manuscript now held in the British Library, and thought to date from the early fifteenth century. The O Antiphons were added to the manuscript in a hand of the late fifteenth century when the volume is thought to have belonged to a woman named Margaret Brent, who was possibly a laywoman from Salisbury.
I almost never bother listening to the fascist Cardinal Raymond Burke but did so to his seditious, lying speech given in place of a homily for the kind of Catholics who would probably have sucked it in if he'd just reread an updated rant by the infamous Fr. Charles Coughlin. There are way, way too many Catholics who are prone to fascism, there always have been and there are power-hungry, evil clergy who are ready to lead them to the devil. And that is an incredibly petty and vindictive cult within Catholicism, one that reaches into the highest reaches of the hierarchy, well financed by billionaires and multi-millionaires.
I don't know if there has ever been a formal and extra serious sin for ordained men in the Catholic church, one that constitutes the sin of lying, breaking the commandment against bearing false witness, spreading racism and bigotry from the alter or lectern during what is supposed to be the Mass, though I doubt they'd ever make it a punishable offense that would involved removing such a liar. If there is such an officially named sin, Cardinal Raymond Burke is among the worst of those.
I doubt there will be any punishment of Burke using the church to promote Republican-fascism and to lend his energy to forementing seditious violence of the kind that fanatical, fascist Catholics are probably more prone to than your average American. I say that knowing full well that the rap that Catholics have gotten for supporting fascists is one of the favorite tools of its enemy. As someone considered a Catholic, maybe those in the hierarchy who support fascism should consider that they are the reason such charges are not entirely an expression of bigotry.
I find it both understandable and enormously frustrating that Pope Francis has not punished the liar Burke, a man who, as a trained in law, such as Canon Law is, one who has conducted trials yet is a liar, a slanderer and a bearer of false witness and racism. Pope Francis has tried to reestablish the model of hierarchy in which the Pope doesn't practice dictatorial powers but it's certain that the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops would never criticize Burke and don't have the power to punish him for the sacrilege of lying from the pulpit during a mass. Only Pope Francis could do that.
I find this does, in fact, match the case of the infamous radio priest, Charles Coughlin in that there were Cardinals, influential ones, who tried to get the Vatican to shut the fascist up. He was actually dangerous. In the end it took a combination of the death of the archbishop who supported him - Even Pius XII wasn't the absolute dictator that JPII wanted to be - and the FDR administration moving to change the rules to require broadcasting licenses and the stations who carried him because he was profitable dumping him as they may have lost their ability to broadcast. You're not going to cripple sedition of this kind without doing that, again.
GRACE Sarah Reynolds
JIMMY Joe Mullins
CORUM Maeve McGrath
DRIVER Diarmuid McIntyre
ADAM Louis Kornfeld
Written by Louis Kornfeld
Produced by Jonathan Mitchell
Made with the assistance of Diarmuid McIntyre and Grey Heron Media
This story was commissioned by RTE’s Drama on One. It was made in association with The Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival and recorded on location in Kilfinane, County Limerick, Ireland.
This is one of those plays that show how much you can do with fifteen minutes some voices, a few sounds and an interesting story.
O radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorun
super quem continebunt reges os suum
quem Gentes deprecabuntur
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare,
O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples
before you kings will shut their mouths
so you the nations will make their prayer
come and deliver us, and delay no longer.
Polish Chamber Choir Schola Cantorum Gedanensis
A nine-year-old boy goes for a walk to escape his troubled household on Christmas Eve, and between the high-rise buildings of the town comes across the remains of a crashed sled, wounded reindeer and a gaunt and intimidating-looking Santa.
Starring Paul Copley, Ellis Hollins and Alun Raglan.
Not as glum as you think at first. Not merry, either. Santa's a pretty rough character who's having a really bad day.
I have, a number of times. I love it, singing in the chorus for it was one of my more memorable university experiences. But anyone who wants to hear the Bach Magnificat or other, well known settings of these texts can find them and listen to them, there are lots of issued recordings and live performances of them on YouTube. I'm totally in favor of people listening to Bach and Charpentier and other great composers but I like to try composers I've never listened to before. Bach and Charpentier were unknown composers too, at one point. I don't post anything I haven't tried myself and liked enough to post it.
Update: Oh. I forgot. The Messiah. I acknowledge that Handel was a fine composer, maybe even a great one. I performed lots of his music when I was in college, accompanying people who sang it and played it in recital, it has never failed to leave me entirely cold. I have never, ever found a performance of The Messiah that did anything else to me. I have no idea why. If you love it, great, listen to his music, sing it, play it. Think of me not taking any of it as leaving all the more for you.
You know, you could start your own blog and post what you want to, it's not hard. You only need an e-mail address.
O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.
O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.
Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, Graham Ross, Gabrielle Haigh, Stefan Kennedy
Follow the money, in the Trump regime cutting the number of Covid vaccine doses going to states.
I would certainly consider putting money on there being some scheme of someone in the Trump crime gang trying to profiteer on it. I would bet that lots of what we saw them do and not do will be tied to profiteering by the Trump crime family and its associated gangsters. And I hope the Biden administration looks into that hard and anyone who played with hundreds of thousands of lives to try to rig things for their profit - WHAT THE HELL ELSE CAN ANYONE WITH A WORKING MIND EXPECT FROM BUSINESS SHARKS WITH POWER - ARE PUNISHED FOR COMMITTING MURDER.
If our legal-judicial system lets them get away with any such crimes it will have proven itself to not only be the enemy of egalitarian democracy but the enemy of the American People.
We have got to get to politics where these kinds of suspicions are not necessary.
I cannot write in English because of the treacherous spelling.
Albert Einstein
Yeah, I did misspell "Austen" having long known a family in town who spells it "Austin". But did you know that ol' Jane, most famous for created shallow characters who are about as deep as the kind of sorority gals who go to school for the sole purpose of getting their MRS, was notoriously bad at the standard spelling of the English language? Her name repeatedly appears on lists of famous writers who were notorious for their "bad spelling".
Faulkner, Hemingway, Keats, Fitzgerald, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, are writers I've seen brought up on their "bad spelling". If you are stupid enough to believe the "hand D" section of the mish-mosh of a play marketed as the one and only evidence that the Stratford guy ever wrote anything but his name (which he never managed to spell the same way twice) you'd certainly have to add William Shakespeare to that list, the spelling in it is all over the place. One of the whoppers of a lie told to link him to it is based in misspelling, though when that is investigated objectively, the argument is inconclusive at best and when objective experts look into it, the case totally falls apart.
Not to mention Thomas Jefferson who once said he didn't have any use for a man who knew only one way to write a word. I have certainly been critical of Jefferson the slave holding hypocrite but not on count of his spelling or even, much, on what I think is rather evident that a lot of the time he was pretty drunk while he wrote.
If I thought it would help me write as well as Dickinson,Keats, Faulkner or Yeats I'd let my spelling go completely to orthographic hell. A knack for visual memory and guess work, which is all "correct spelling" indicates is a rather minor skill though one given completely outsized repute by mid-brows. The greatest writers of the English language haven't had it in any greater percentage than the general population, lots of useless scribblers have it. I suspect that's the basis of many a scribbling class hack's life choice. Doesn't make what they say worth reading.
O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviter disponensque omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.
O Wisdom, you came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and reach from one end of the earth to the other, mightily and sweetly ordering all things: come and teach us the way of prudence.
St. Mark's Cathedral Choir
Dean Seuss, Director
Doing something I seldom do, follow up a Twitter thread I came across something by the nerdy cartoonist Randall Monroe that is probably accurate and, oddly, very important.
Randall Munroe
@xkcd
Replying to
@xkcd
There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than NY, more Trump voters in NY than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.
There's a map that Monroe has drawn that adds some context to that observation.
If you go to the link and click on it you can get some detail as to where concentrations of Trump voters and Biden voters are located though like any such map, even one far, far better than the stupid and dangerous Electoral College maps, it will make votes for one or the other candidate disappear from view. Well, that's what the Electoral college does.
As a rural voter in a town which has, until recently, had a concentration of old-line Yankee Republicans ususally in the majority, I'm especially annoyed by the disappearing of voters.
One of the things that this points out is how the Electoral College exacerbates regional and even state divisions as it disenfranchises voters across the country, if you vote for a Democrat in a state that votes in even the tiniest majority or even a plurality for a Republican for president, the system throws out your vote. You can vote in every single presidential election and the sytem can disenfranchise you every time. And that's OK with so many small-state legislatures and Senates and others because they figure they can rig things when nothing about a democratic election should be open to any kind of rigging.
I was going to mention the putrid scumbag Rand Paul lying about the election of Joe Biden and it's good for that scumbag that I can't punch him in his lying mush. Rand, no doubt inheriting his elitism and racism from his libertarian daddy, things that "non-traditional" voters casting legal votes is illegitimate and produces an invalid result. No doubt he's afraid of "non-traditional" voters voting in his benighted state and throwing his ass out. I can't say that I don't resent Kentucky for giving us two of the worst Senators in recent memory - my state just reinstalled Susan Collins so Maine has nothing to be proud of in that regard - but I keep in mind that there are plenty of Kentuckians who voted for Joe Biden and who vote for better candidates, it's just that they aren't in the majority.
Rand Paul is a total disgrace, Kentucky should feel as ashamed of having him as a Senator as I do that Collins is in the Senate from Maine. I know it's not only the Second district, the most rural area of the state that went most strongly for her but there were plenty of Republican scumbuckets down here nearer the population center too. There's a whole lot of shame to go round.
Having been critical of Randall Monroe in the past, I figure I should give credit where it is due. He obviously understands how things get distorted, though his statement is more useful than the map, though it is a big improvement.
