Note 2016: I was going to write a new post about this topic but the one I did last year was pretty good so I'm just going to repeat it. Note 2017, Why reinvent the wheel? I decided to post this before the start of the Triduum. Get it out of the way.
It comes around every year as certainly as FOX "news" pushing the "war on Christmas" nonsense, the internet babble about how the "Xians" stole Easter from those poor put upon pagans. I'm reading it all over the place today so I'm posting this now. Somehow the "reality community" thinks that the English invented Easter. The whole thing centers around the derivation of the English name "Easter" by the Anglo Saxon monk, The Venerable Bede in 725. From The Reckoning of Time:
Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.
Apparently that statement is the sole reason that this modern myth arose, no other one, apparently, making that claim. You wonder why a bunch of "Xian" haters take the word of a Catholic monk for it. I'm no expert in the minor goddesses of Germanic paganism but the entire issue of Germanic paganism as known in the early 8th century is made moot by the fact that by that time Christians around the Mediterranean had been fighting over the right time to observe the PASCAL TIME for, oh, about 535 years and likely longer.
Ecclesiastical history preserves the memory of three distinct phases of the dispute regarding the proper time of observing Easter. It will add to clearness if we in the first place state what is certain regarding the date and the nature of these three categories.
First phase
The first was mainly concerned with the lawfulness of celebrating Easter on a weekday. We read in Eusebius (Church History V.23): "A question of no small importance arose at that time [i.e. the time of Pope Victor, about A.D. 190]. The dioceses of all Asia, as from an older tradition, held that the fourteenth day of the moon, on which day the Jews were commanded to sacrifice the lamb, should always be observed as the feast of the life-giving pasch [epi tes tou soteriou Pascha heortes], contending that the fast ought to end on that day, whatever day of the week it might happen to be. However it was not the custom of the churches in the rest of the world to end it at this point, as they observed the practice, which from Apostolic tradition has prevailed to the present time, of terminating the fast on no other day than on that of the Resurrection of our Saviour. Synods and assemblies of bishops were held on this account, and all with one consent through mutual correspondence drew up an ecclesiastical decree that the mystery of the Resurrection of the Lord should be celebrated on no other day but the Sunday and that we should observe the close of the paschal fast on that day only." These words of the Father of Church History, followed by some extracts which he makes from the controversial letters of the time, tell us almost all that we know concerning the paschal controversy in its first stage. A letter of St. Irenæus is among the extracts just referred to, and this shows that the diversity of practice regarding Easter had existed at least from the time of Pope Sixtus (c. 120). Further, Irenaeus states that St. Polycarp, who like the other Asiatics, kept Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon, whatever day of the week that might be, following therein the tradition which he claimed to have derived from St. John the Apostle, came to Rome c. 150 about this very question, but could not be persuaded by Pope Anicetus to relinquish his Quartodeciman observance. Nevertheless he was not debarred from communion with the Roman Church, and St. Irenæus, while condemning the Quartodeciman practice, nevertheless reproaches Pope Victor (c. 189-99) with having excommunicated the Asiatics too precipitately and with not having followed the moderation of his predecessors. The question thus debated was therefore primarily whether Easter was to be kept on a Sunday, or whether Christians should observe the Holy Day of the Jews, the fourteenth of Nisan, which might occur on any day of the week. Those who kept Easter with the Jews were called Quartodecimans or terountes (observants); but even in the time of Pope Victor this usage hardly extended beyond the churches of Asia Minor. After the pope's strong measures the Quartodecimans seem to have gradually dwindled away. Origen in the "Philosophumena" (VIII, xviii) seems to regard them as a mere handful of wrong-headed nonconformists.
The fact is that in the Greek language the far older name for the feast day is "Paskha" apparently from where the Latin "Pascha" comes from, all of which is taken from the Hebrew word for the Passover "Pesach", all of which pre-date any interaction that Christians are likely to have had with Germanic rabbit worshipers by a considerable time.
Let me take a second to point out that anyone who knows anything about the accounts of the execution and Resurrection of Jesus, would know that it was entirely, intimately and from the beginning related to THE PASSOVER, WHICH HAD ALREADY BEEN SET FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL BY THE 1ST CENTURY.
14 This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance. 15 Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; on the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day shall be cut off from Israel. 16 On the first day you shall hold a solemn assembly, and on the seventh day a solemn assembly; no work shall be done on those days; only what everyone must eat, that alone may be prepared by you. 17 You shall observe the festival of unleavened bread, for on this very day I brought your companies out of the land of Egypt: you shall observe this day throughout your generations as a perpetual ordinance.
Exodus 12:14-17
The Christian holiday has NOTHING to do with German paganism, it would be more accurate to say that pagan practices polluted the Jewish-Christian holiday.
All of the romance languages I know of derive their name for Easter from the same cognates from the Hebrew. And even a number of Germanic tongues, such as Danish (Påske), Swedish (Påsk), and even Icelandic (Páskar) who would seem to have missed the Eostre bandwagon. You'd think that the isolated island that preserved the Sagas and, as my old History of English teacher claimed, a closer affinity with Anglo Saxon than modern English does, would have retained it if anyone would have, but it was likely never there to start with. *
If anyone had a legitimate beef to make over the holiday, it would be the Jews and Jesus and everyone named in the accounts of the event, except a few Romans, were Jews, including Jesus.
But what can you expect, the same people run their own ideological campaigns around Christmas, just like FOX does.
* Update: Other than German and English and a few modern descendants of German such as the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch, just about all of the names for Easter in most languages are, clearly, derived from the Hebrew cognate name for the the holiest day of the Christian year. Some examples, Norwegian (Påske), Scots (Pace), Welsh (Pasg), and, Irish Gaelic, (Cáisc) I suspect through a p to hard c consonant shift, though I'm no Irish scholar, much to my shame. Even the near cousins of English don't share in the "Eostre" stuff showing more affinity in their name for the day to the Hebrew, Flemmish (Poaschn), Frisian (Peaske).
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Tal Hurwitz - Sonata For Guitar
Kostas Tosidis, guitar
Not a great recording but a great performance of this sonata which I've listened to about a dozen times and which I love more with every hearing. It must have about the maximum number of notes per second of any piece for classical guitar I'm aware of. I wish the composer would record it. This sonata won the 2008 First Prize in the composer's competition of the Boston Guitar Festival. It's supposed to have been published as the winner but I'm unable to find the score anywhere. Not that I'd ever be able to play it, it's real virtuoso music. I wish there were more of his compositions available.
Oh, My - Duncan Black, What The Fuck Is Wrong With You?
Sometimes I get annoyed at things which can become "taboo." Putting it simply, making fun of rape victims is not funny, but that does not mean any joke about rape is off limits. Sometimes the press secretary suggests that Hitler wasn't that bad, and you gotta make some jokes. And the Holocaust can be hilarious! If done right, of course.
Funny, I don't remember him thinking it was hilarious when I joked about his blog and his incestuous, inbred blogging community. Or maybe I wasn't doing it right? I doubt he cares for my jokes about his aging, though maybe my poking fun at his writing career doesn't bother him much. I know for a fact he didn't like it the night that I made fun of his post about the putridly non-funny Penn Jillette movie "The Aristocrats" because he banned me that night for making fun of it.
Of course, it's not just Duncan Black or other rapidly aging middle-aged, straight, white guys trying to be kewl, a lot of alleged comedians on the make, desperate to get edgy so someone will pay attention to them who are always looking to push the envelope to boost their careers or keep them on life support or to resuscitate them when they should just pull the plug.
I think there's something wrong with a. a person who makes jokes about mass murder and genocide, b. laughs at jokes about mass murder and genocide, c. who pretends there can ever be anything funny about mass murder and genocide.
This article from a couple of weeks back about, God help us, a movie that "looks at ‘the ultimate taboo" of making jokes about the Holocaust. It, of course, mentions many Jewish comedians, from hoary ol' Mel and Carl right down to some I've never heard of because they're young. Marjorie Ingall goes all over the place in the article as do the comedians and others mentioned, some agreeing as to what's funny, some disagreeing, some saying this, some saying that, some pointing out things like that most unfunny of all current asshole Sacha Baron Cohen singing “Throw the Jew Down the Well” in a "redneck" bar certainly meant different things to bigots hearing it than SBC wanted to get out of it. If anyone thinks that any of his movies making fun of "rednecks" has a positive influence in the world, did you happen to miss the white supremacists in the Trump regime?
Turning genocide into a joke has certainly been done before, I have no doubt the SS and other Nazis thought it was an appropriate topic for joking, as those who have committed other genocides, terror and mass murder campaigns have. I can't imagine that the Einsatzgruppen didn't make jokes about the days mass murders among themselves, I have heard American soldiers joking about the people they killed.
Can anyone point out to me the humor that the victims of the Nazi genocides created out of their own, impending murders? Any jokes I've heard about it have come from Americans and Brits who weren't there, seeing their families murdered, being kept alive only by the glut of people being murdered that week.
Jeesh, Duncan, I knew you could be a jerk, I didn't know you were that much of an asshole. If what Sean Spicer said out of stupidity and incapacity was terrible, during Passover, what you said is entirely worse.
Update: Oh, yeah, I just remembered, how about this shtick from Donald Trump jr. from last fall.
"The media has been her number one surrogate in this. Without the media, this wouldn’t even be a contest, but the media has built her up,” Trump Jr said. “They’ve let her slide on every indiscrepancy [sic], on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing. If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.”
I wonder if any of the chatter at Baby Blue mentioned it that day.
Funny, I don't remember him thinking it was hilarious when I joked about his blog and his incestuous, inbred blogging community. Or maybe I wasn't doing it right? I doubt he cares for my jokes about his aging, though maybe my poking fun at his writing career doesn't bother him much. I know for a fact he didn't like it the night that I made fun of his post about the putridly non-funny Penn Jillette movie "The Aristocrats" because he banned me that night for making fun of it.
Of course, it's not just Duncan Black or other rapidly aging middle-aged, straight, white guys trying to be kewl, a lot of alleged comedians on the make, desperate to get edgy so someone will pay attention to them who are always looking to push the envelope to boost their careers or keep them on life support or to resuscitate them when they should just pull the plug.
I think there's something wrong with a. a person who makes jokes about mass murder and genocide, b. laughs at jokes about mass murder and genocide, c. who pretends there can ever be anything funny about mass murder and genocide.
This article from a couple of weeks back about, God help us, a movie that "looks at ‘the ultimate taboo" of making jokes about the Holocaust. It, of course, mentions many Jewish comedians, from hoary ol' Mel and Carl right down to some I've never heard of because they're young. Marjorie Ingall goes all over the place in the article as do the comedians and others mentioned, some agreeing as to what's funny, some disagreeing, some saying this, some saying that, some pointing out things like that most unfunny of all current asshole Sacha Baron Cohen singing “Throw the Jew Down the Well” in a "redneck" bar certainly meant different things to bigots hearing it than SBC wanted to get out of it. If anyone thinks that any of his movies making fun of "rednecks" has a positive influence in the world, did you happen to miss the white supremacists in the Trump regime?
Turning genocide into a joke has certainly been done before, I have no doubt the SS and other Nazis thought it was an appropriate topic for joking, as those who have committed other genocides, terror and mass murder campaigns have. I can't imagine that the Einsatzgruppen didn't make jokes about the days mass murders among themselves, I have heard American soldiers joking about the people they killed.
Can anyone point out to me the humor that the victims of the Nazi genocides created out of their own, impending murders? Any jokes I've heard about it have come from Americans and Brits who weren't there, seeing their families murdered, being kept alive only by the glut of people being murdered that week.
Jeesh, Duncan, I knew you could be a jerk, I didn't know you were that much of an asshole. If what Sean Spicer said out of stupidity and incapacity was terrible, during Passover, what you said is entirely worse.
Update: Oh, yeah, I just remembered, how about this shtick from Donald Trump jr. from last fall.
"The media has been her number one surrogate in this. Without the media, this wouldn’t even be a contest, but the media has built her up,” Trump Jr said. “They’ve let her slide on every indiscrepancy [sic], on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing. If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.”
I wonder if any of the chatter at Baby Blue mentioned it that day.
Two Points For A Pointy Headed Putz And One For Another Putz
A. That constitutes having a hand into the putrid, racist, stupid, pointless Seinfeld show,
B. It's impossible to have even "profound ignorance" of anything to do with Seinfeld as there is not one profound thing about it. It is in every aspect banal.
C. You can tell Tlaz that I know one thing, it's a sign of stupidity for a blog rat to choose to name herself after a goddess who eats shit. Anyone can feel superior to someone stupid enough to do that.
B. It's impossible to have even "profound ignorance" of anything to do with Seinfeld as there is not one profound thing about it. It is in every aspect banal.
C. You can tell Tlaz that I know one thing, it's a sign of stupidity for a blog rat to choose to name herself after a goddess who eats shit. Anyone can feel superior to someone stupid enough to do that.
Abraham Joshua Heschel May 29, 1968
Almost 49 years ago, Heschel said that the materialistic consideration of people as objects was at the center of all our crises and he implied that our consideration of nature in those terms was part of it. I can only imagine what he would have to say, today, when the materialistic tendencies he condemned and decried has become the standard ideology of the entirety of Western and even other cultures. His identification of the alternative to that, or at least one of the major and most effective alternatives, is found in the Jewish Bible, is exactly why it is so hated by a culture which has adopted the "enligthenment" materialist concept of people as objects along with the amorality that view not only permits but which is its motivation.
In the course of his lecture he referred, off hand to Julien Offray de La Mettrie's book Machine Man, one of the landmark publications of the European "enlightenment" considered to be one of the foundations of modernism. La Mettrie, certainly believing in the amorality that is a logical conclusion of materialism, lived his philosophy and espoused it in later writings in which he praised the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. His biography is instructive as to the wisdom of such materilism as his libertine philosophy and life style reportedly was disgusting even by the standards of his fellow French materialists of the "enlightnement" which led him to flee first to the Netherlands and when he'd disguted folks there, he fled to the Prussian court of Fredrick the Great where he was celebrated as a great hero of the new enlightnement and as a medical expert. Only the ass, in a feat of epicurean indulgence, ate himself to death one night, stuffing himself full of pate at a feast given in his honor, dying of gluttony at the age of 41.
His materialist theories of humanity are a development of Descartes' machine theory of animals. There is a long but direct line between those absurdly naive reductionist views of humanity and the 20th century and today's mass murders. Whatever you can say about the mass murderers of the earlier epochs, those of todays are intimately tied in with the scientific, materialist view of life that started this view of things we call "modern". Note how Heschel discussed the thinking of the kind which held "We had to burn the village to save it".
Update: I listen to a lot of lectures because I like to listen to lectures. Perhaps due to my failing eyesight, perhaps because I like to have something to think about while I do housework and gardening. What would you rather I listen to? Seinfeld reruns? I hadn't known till recently that Steve Bannon had a hand in that awful show, it figures.
The Problem With The Idea Of "Less Evil" Mass Murderers And Its Use In Ideological Devaluation Of Murder Victims
Sean Spicer should have passed over the thought that has gotten him in a Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller (remember him?) sized stew. His use of a series of ill chosen, ill considered, plumb ignorant metaphors connecting Bashar al-Assad's use of Sarin with Hitler - implying if not outright stating that in this one instance, Hitler comes out morally superior to Assad was incredibly stupid in someone who holds the position of White House Press Secretary, it's more like something you'd hear from an idiot in a bar after they'd had too many. And to say what he did during Passover didn't help. I think some of the stream of amazingly bad stuff was him having a vague sense that he'd stepped in it up to at least his thighs but like movie quick sand, his thrashing around only got him in it deeper.
Let's all stipulate at the start that Sean Spicer isn't a very smart man, not a man of high principles, certainly not a man who's good having to deal with a legitimate reporter instead of an op-ed or chat show level of reality, especially on his feet with the lights on him. Though you could probably say the same about easily 99% of those who run alleged news shows on cabloid and broadcast TV and radio.
I will confess that other than the dreadful offensiveness of it, I figured it couldn't have happened to a more deserving press secretary in the most dreadful administrations in American history. Our Constitution would seem to have produced way too many of those, it used to be the George W. Bush administration that held that position. Tell me, again, as you boogy to Hamilton* why we're supposed to revere it? But that's another matter.
One thing I think got him into trouble is shown in the piece about this by David A. Graham at the Atlantic website, in which he tries to explain why bringing up Hitler for a comparison is not allowed. Which I can't entirely agree with for a number of reasons. Graham said at the start:
There’s no good time to make a Hitler comparison, but deploying one in the midst of Passover to justify voluntary airstrikes is an especially unwise choice, as White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer realized, to his chagrin, Tuesday afternoon.
If he meant there was no reason for Spicer to have gone there, probably not, it wasn't part of the question and unless you know what the hell you're really talking about, making references to such a hot button figure in history can get you into a whole mess of trouble.
But Graham meant that literally as he shows later in the piece:
The problem here, as with all Hitler analogies, is that comparing anyone to history’s greatest villain feels as though it is a trump card when in fact it tends to undermine whatever argument it seeks to bolster. On the one hand, almost any comparison between the barbarity of a modern figure and Hitler will quickly fall apart. On the other, it always demands a single course of action, all-out war against the target, which paralyzes any debate.
There are so many problems contained in that idea that maybe they should be considered. The whole matter of comparing massively evil figures in the Hitler class of evil, of which modern history has provided several, is only problematic in that our habits of thought will imply that one is "less bad" than another in going through the artificial and phony motion of making such a ranking. How do you measure it? By body count? I don't see how you can do that without saying that murdering two-million, one of the figures I've seen estimating the murder count under Pol Pot makes Pol Pot made him"less evil" than Hitler or Stalin or Mao or any of the other many "lesser" but incredibly terrible mass murderers of the 20th century or before.
How can you say that someone who murdered 2,000,000 people was "less evil" than? Certainly if they'd had the chance to kill two-hundred million people and they thought it would get them what they wanted, they'd have done it. If Stalin had lived twenty more years he'd have run up a far higher murder count than he did, as would Hitler as would Efraín Ríos Montt (he's still alive and, I believe, has never been punished).
And, clearly, you can murder more people, millions more and be considered "less evil than". I think it is a fact that Stalin has certainly been presented as "less bad" than Hitler, for one thing he was the West's partner in getting rid of Hitler but the numbers of murders under him are generally estimated at being more than Hitlers, partially because his dictatorship lasted longer and came within the long lasting Soviet red-fascist Marxist period in Russia's long history of dictators. Geography played a big part in that alliance of necessity and convenience. Over time there have been those playing this game who have claimed that Hitler was "less bad" than Stalin. That is considered to, somehow, be a more evil position than the one that says Stalin was better, even if it was just that he was "our bastard" to use Truman's phrase.
Why either position is considered respectable, in the media, in the arts, in academia is certainly a question to be asked. Why should any position that finds any number of murders by dictators "less bad" or even "acceptable" be tolerated?
Ideology has determined a lot of it, the red brand of fascism, that has been the reality of Marxism in the world, has long been considered more respectable than other brands for entirely irrational reasons, allowing the most respected and respectable among us to lie about and sweep under the rug the murders of scores of millions and the grinding oppression of well over a billion even in the post-war period when no alliance with a Stalin was a matter of grim necessity. Is it really any better to be a Marxist than a Nazi with the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Lenin, and the many lesser Communist dictatorships being as much of a public fact as the crimes of Hitler and Mussolini? And what the Marxists have done, the anti-Marxists sometimes have done, excusing the crimes of facists and even, in some cases, Hitler.
No, the problem with comparisons among the mega-murdering dictators of history is exactly that by doing that you do let other murderers off the hook, partially or entirely. If you don't intend to it will be taken that way by people whose thinking is too superficial to understand anything more complex than a simplistic ranking. A lot of that could end if we all agreed that any number of murders by rulers, including those of the United States, Britain, France, etc. are murders and render the murderers illegitimate as rulers and criminals. But that would be very inconvenient for us.
Maybe it would be easier to compare Assad to mass murderers with a number of victims closer to his own. Somewhere in the last week I'd heard it's estimated he's responsible for as many as a half-million dead in Syria - though that might have been the dead for the entire war, by all sides. Compare that to the numbers dead in the Iraq invasion under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, or the numbers in various other disasters like those in Central Africa in the wake of America overthrowing Patrice Lumumba, or take your pick.
Does any of this work? I don't think it does, certainly not if you excuse a smaller murder count with a bigger one. All of those acts, all of the people who did things that killed or predictably killed large numbers of people are certainly evil enough to warrant total opposition, though I never noticed an American President or Vice President (in the case of the Cheney regency) who did that have it be acknowledged as comparable with murder counts of a similar number. We certainly don't do it often and it is certainly not allowed in the respectable press. Quite often the respectable press of the kind the Atlantic is part of, is cheering on the killing. The history of the New York Times written in terms of wars it's mongered and endorsed and encouraged and sold would certainly be an eye-opener. If I were twenty-years younger I might try it. But that hasn't even really been done.
* I heard some of it, it's crap music and crappier history. Oh, how I do hate musicals.
Let's all stipulate at the start that Sean Spicer isn't a very smart man, not a man of high principles, certainly not a man who's good having to deal with a legitimate reporter instead of an op-ed or chat show level of reality, especially on his feet with the lights on him. Though you could probably say the same about easily 99% of those who run alleged news shows on cabloid and broadcast TV and radio.
I will confess that other than the dreadful offensiveness of it, I figured it couldn't have happened to a more deserving press secretary in the most dreadful administrations in American history. Our Constitution would seem to have produced way too many of those, it used to be the George W. Bush administration that held that position. Tell me, again, as you boogy to Hamilton* why we're supposed to revere it? But that's another matter.
One thing I think got him into trouble is shown in the piece about this by David A. Graham at the Atlantic website, in which he tries to explain why bringing up Hitler for a comparison is not allowed. Which I can't entirely agree with for a number of reasons. Graham said at the start:
There’s no good time to make a Hitler comparison, but deploying one in the midst of Passover to justify voluntary airstrikes is an especially unwise choice, as White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer realized, to his chagrin, Tuesday afternoon.
If he meant there was no reason for Spicer to have gone there, probably not, it wasn't part of the question and unless you know what the hell you're really talking about, making references to such a hot button figure in history can get you into a whole mess of trouble.
But Graham meant that literally as he shows later in the piece:
The problem here, as with all Hitler analogies, is that comparing anyone to history’s greatest villain feels as though it is a trump card when in fact it tends to undermine whatever argument it seeks to bolster. On the one hand, almost any comparison between the barbarity of a modern figure and Hitler will quickly fall apart. On the other, it always demands a single course of action, all-out war against the target, which paralyzes any debate.
There are so many problems contained in that idea that maybe they should be considered. The whole matter of comparing massively evil figures in the Hitler class of evil, of which modern history has provided several, is only problematic in that our habits of thought will imply that one is "less bad" than another in going through the artificial and phony motion of making such a ranking. How do you measure it? By body count? I don't see how you can do that without saying that murdering two-million, one of the figures I've seen estimating the murder count under Pol Pot makes Pol Pot made him"less evil" than Hitler or Stalin or Mao or any of the other many "lesser" but incredibly terrible mass murderers of the 20th century or before.
How can you say that someone who murdered 2,000,000 people was "less evil" than? Certainly if they'd had the chance to kill two-hundred million people and they thought it would get them what they wanted, they'd have done it. If Stalin had lived twenty more years he'd have run up a far higher murder count than he did, as would Hitler as would Efraín Ríos Montt (he's still alive and, I believe, has never been punished).
And, clearly, you can murder more people, millions more and be considered "less evil than". I think it is a fact that Stalin has certainly been presented as "less bad" than Hitler, for one thing he was the West's partner in getting rid of Hitler but the numbers of murders under him are generally estimated at being more than Hitlers, partially because his dictatorship lasted longer and came within the long lasting Soviet red-fascist Marxist period in Russia's long history of dictators. Geography played a big part in that alliance of necessity and convenience. Over time there have been those playing this game who have claimed that Hitler was "less bad" than Stalin. That is considered to, somehow, be a more evil position than the one that says Stalin was better, even if it was just that he was "our bastard" to use Truman's phrase.
Why either position is considered respectable, in the media, in the arts, in academia is certainly a question to be asked. Why should any position that finds any number of murders by dictators "less bad" or even "acceptable" be tolerated?
Ideology has determined a lot of it, the red brand of fascism, that has been the reality of Marxism in the world, has long been considered more respectable than other brands for entirely irrational reasons, allowing the most respected and respectable among us to lie about and sweep under the rug the murders of scores of millions and the grinding oppression of well over a billion even in the post-war period when no alliance with a Stalin was a matter of grim necessity. Is it really any better to be a Marxist than a Nazi with the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Lenin, and the many lesser Communist dictatorships being as much of a public fact as the crimes of Hitler and Mussolini? And what the Marxists have done, the anti-Marxists sometimes have done, excusing the crimes of facists and even, in some cases, Hitler.
No, the problem with comparisons among the mega-murdering dictators of history is exactly that by doing that you do let other murderers off the hook, partially or entirely. If you don't intend to it will be taken that way by people whose thinking is too superficial to understand anything more complex than a simplistic ranking. A lot of that could end if we all agreed that any number of murders by rulers, including those of the United States, Britain, France, etc. are murders and render the murderers illegitimate as rulers and criminals. But that would be very inconvenient for us.
Maybe it would be easier to compare Assad to mass murderers with a number of victims closer to his own. Somewhere in the last week I'd heard it's estimated he's responsible for as many as a half-million dead in Syria - though that might have been the dead for the entire war, by all sides. Compare that to the numbers dead in the Iraq invasion under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, or the numbers in various other disasters like those in Central Africa in the wake of America overthrowing Patrice Lumumba, or take your pick.
Does any of this work? I don't think it does, certainly not if you excuse a smaller murder count with a bigger one. All of those acts, all of the people who did things that killed or predictably killed large numbers of people are certainly evil enough to warrant total opposition, though I never noticed an American President or Vice President (in the case of the Cheney regency) who did that have it be acknowledged as comparable with murder counts of a similar number. We certainly don't do it often and it is certainly not allowed in the respectable press. Quite often the respectable press of the kind the Atlantic is part of, is cheering on the killing. The history of the New York Times written in terms of wars it's mongered and endorsed and encouraged and sold would certainly be an eye-opener. If I were twenty-years younger I might try it. But that hasn't even really been done.
* I heard some of it, it's crap music and crappier history. Oh, how I do hate musicals.
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Viet P. Cuong - Obsession
Played by the spectacular Xavier Jara in 2015 the year he won the adult competition at the Boston Guitar Festival, Viet P. Cuong's composition Obsession won the composition competition at the Festival the year before.
Catch the list of performers who have already commissioned or performed Cuong. Composers twice his age would love to have that CV.
The Wits of Eschaton
R. McGeddon, Kleptokakistocrat LimeRickey • an hour ago
Has Little Gloves or Spicer talked about moving Jews to Arizona yet?
Riffing off of what Simps has said about yours truly, at Duncan's Daycare for Adults in Diapers.
Maybe "R. McGeddon" doesn't remember that a few years back, he had an idea of where Jews belonged.
Which is what inspired Simp's witticism about a "homeland for Gypsies" in.... what was his witty idea, Oh, yeah.
Update: Hey, maybe I should have called it The Half-Wits of Eschaton.
Update 2: That's so flaccid it doesn't even deserve a new limerick, here's one of my recent ones.
While formerly sprinkled with wits
But now such have all called it quits,
Baby Blue fades to dun, can
It be other spun than
Eschaton's a collection of eejits.
Update 3: I'm not surprised, he got this started by figuring other ethnic groups were inferior. He's got a lot in common with Pam Geller.
Update 4: How like him, he's really a racist coward who figures the natives of the region are cowards against all proof. If it weren't fashionable for lefties to be pro-Muslim, except when it's fashionable to be anti-Muslim, he'd sound just like Geller.
Has Little Gloves or Spicer talked about moving Jews to Arizona yet?
Riffing off of what Simps has said about yours truly, at Duncan's Daycare for Adults in Diapers.
Maybe "R. McGeddon" doesn't remember that a few years back, he had an idea of where Jews belonged.
Which is what inspired Simp's witticism about a "homeland for Gypsies" in.... what was his witty idea, Oh, yeah.
Update: Hey, maybe I should have called it The Half-Wits of Eschaton.
Update 2: That's so flaccid it doesn't even deserve a new limerick, here's one of my recent ones.
While formerly sprinkled with wits
But now such have all called it quits,
Baby Blue fades to dun, can
It be other spun than
Eschaton's a collection of eejits.
Update 3: I'm not surprised, he got this started by figuring other ethnic groups were inferior. He's got a lot in common with Pam Geller.
Update 4: How like him, he's really a racist coward who figures the natives of the region are cowards against all proof. If it weren't fashionable for lefties to be pro-Muslim, except when it's fashionable to be anti-Muslim, he'd sound just like Geller.
If you haven't read what Sean Spicer said in full, with apology and why it is in the running for worst things ever said by a White House Press Secretary, all I can say is Charles Pierce covered it well.
The man is a marvel of cluelessness a perfect spokesman for the Trump regime of clueless thugs.
He would be in over his head standing in the middle of sheets of paper lying flat on the ground.
The man is a marvel of cluelessness a perfect spokesman for the Trump regime of clueless thugs.
He would be in over his head standing in the middle of sheets of paper lying flat on the ground.
Walter Brueggemann - Fidelity And The Seduction of Certitude
There are two introductions that go on several minutes, just to warn those who want to get right to the lecture and question.
I have mentioned before that I'd intended to spend last year going over the work of Reinhold Niebuhr but was so taken with the revelation of the First Testament and its continuation into the Second one by Walter Brueggemann that I have concentrated on his ideas about that, for the most part. Of all the great theologians and scholars and commentators that I've read since the mid-1990s, his are especially useful to understanding the texts and using them to understand our times and ourselves. His critique of the American Imperial system, how it relates to corporate-consumerist ideology and habits, the corruption of our lives and minds is worth spending a few years on because nothing that I wasted my time on from the secular left and even much of that which was somewhat valuable has been more radically effective in forcing a change in me of both my thinking and my practice. I can say that the past year and a half of reading him and listening to him and writing about what he said has changed me more for what feels like the better than just about any other writer or speaker. It forced me to finally face the inadequacy of the secular left and not only its inadequacy but the harm it has done because, in the end, its basis is the same one as the American imperial system and that of all other corporate establishments.
I'm beginning to read more from other theologians, scholars and thinkers and will probably not be posting as much concentrating on Walter Brueggemann but I expect I'm not going to ever be far from the next book, lecture, sermon or article of his from now on.
A Changed Score Won't Change The Blame Game
Oh, my, so much of the angry stuff written from right after the election till now would seem to have been based on false reporting of phony figures from the polling people. A non-instant analysis of what I would imagine is somewhat less bad data has been done.
A more accurate analysis of the 2016 presidential election than the preliminary exit polls shows that Hillary Clinton won the Catholic vote, so now I’m waiting for the spate of stories about how the Democratic Party should stop worrying about courting religious voters and hold strongly to its pro-choice position.
Clinton won the Catholic vote by 48% to 45% for Trump, according to an analysis of data from the nonpartisan American National Elections Studies by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. That’s compared to exit poll data that suggested Trump won the Catholic vote by 52% to 45%.
I am not waiting for all of the blog babblers and anti-Christian, anti-Catholic commentators to do a correction. If they correct any of the stuff they spewed out back then, let me know because I'm not going to waste any time looking for it. I don't expect it will be there.
What there is in further analysis of their data shows that the generally Democratic character of "the Catholic vote" will likely continue to be and maybe will be more Democratic.
The only age group that overwhelmingly voted for Trump were Catholics age 75 and older, who went for Trump 57% to 44%. The age groups roughly corresponding to Baby Boomers and Gen Xers split narrowly, with Boomers favoring Trump by two points (49% to 47%) and Xers favoring Clinton by two points (46% to 44%). But Millennial Catholics favored Clinton by a whopping 31% (59% to 28%), by far the largest split of any age group.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the white Catholics who heavily favored Trump in 2016 are what the gerontologists call the “old old.” With life expectancy hovering around 81 for white females and 76 for white males, it doesn’t take a math wiz to figure out that many of these Trump voters won’t be around in 2020 and most will have gone to that great election booth in the sky by 2024.
Whew! I narrowly missed out of being with the goats instead of the sheep on that one, I'm old but not "old old" though none of the "old olds" among the Catholics in my family I'm aware of voted for Trump. One of my oldest Catholic cousins seldom says "Republicans" without the word "dirty" placed before it. Depending on how you cut the crap to find someone to blame I would insist that I am not one of the "white men" who are a more obvious group to pin the blame on because I'm not a "straight white man" but am "LGBT" If not "LGBTQ" though old enough so I will never find the "Q" word acceptable.
Anyway, the fastest growing cohort of Catholics went decisively for Clinton:
Similarly, the Hispanic vote went overwhelmingly for Clinton at 74% to 19%, for a massive 55% advantage. Of course, at least some of this can be accounted for by Trump’s hostility toward Hispanic immigrants and may not carry over to future Republican candidates. But young voters have a tendency to stick with the party they first vote for, so it’s likely that Trump has created a generation of Democratic voters among the fast-growing Latino population.
The election of 2016 also shows that contrary to some predictions, the pro-choice stance of the Democratic Party isn’t a turn off for Hispanic voters. And appeals to some “abortion lite” position is unlikely to sway those white Catholics who are committed to the Republican Party. As Mark Gray, polling director for CARA, noted of the results:
Party comes first for many Catholics and they then try to make that fit within their faith. I don’t mean that in a way that being a Democrat or being a Republican is more important to them than being Catholic. But I mean that at the ballot box, partisanship trumps their faith when they make their choice.
All of this suggests that the election of 2016 was somewhat of a demographic outlier, the last gasp of old white Catholics if you will. Millennials and Hispanics are the future of the Democratic Party. It doesn’t need to contort itself with appeals to conservative religious voters on abortion. Time truly is on the Democrats’ side.
I haven't looked at the figures about what other religious groups slimed in the wake of the election might show. I wonder if the figures considered more reliable will be different from those that everyone was whining about for the past four months.
What isn't on our side is FOX and cabloid news and the Republican-fascist hold on the states and the Supreme Court where they are reinstituting Jim Crow even in places that hardly if ever had it before. The Republican Party is the party of white supremacists, overt fascists, actual Nazis and such folk in places like Michigan and Wisconsin who are a throw-back to the crypto-Nazism of a perversion of Calvinism that produced South African apartheid. But it is, probably most dangerously, the party of the sociopath billionaire boys and girls club and their billions and ability to buy what they want from our corrupt system. They and foreign dictators like Putin have a fleet of hireling lawyers and advisors to allow them to game the stinking corpse of the 18th century Constitution that idiots are paying to worship on Broadway these days figuring lying up make believe history has of the kind that got us here has got something like civic virtue.
But, hey, why let those complicated issues get in the way of a good old fashioned hate-fest like the ones all over the blogs right after the election, based on those phony exit-polls? I'll tell you why, it's dangerous and hard to fight against the real enemy, they're really powerful and a lot of the real things that got us here are the idols of American materialism and lore. It's a lot easier to place the blame on safer easier targets. Like those Trump voters who blamed Black people and Latinos for the billionaires shafting them. People can be such cowards.
A more accurate analysis of the 2016 presidential election than the preliminary exit polls shows that Hillary Clinton won the Catholic vote, so now I’m waiting for the spate of stories about how the Democratic Party should stop worrying about courting religious voters and hold strongly to its pro-choice position.
Clinton won the Catholic vote by 48% to 45% for Trump, according to an analysis of data from the nonpartisan American National Elections Studies by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. That’s compared to exit poll data that suggested Trump won the Catholic vote by 52% to 45%.
I am not waiting for all of the blog babblers and anti-Christian, anti-Catholic commentators to do a correction. If they correct any of the stuff they spewed out back then, let me know because I'm not going to waste any time looking for it. I don't expect it will be there.
What there is in further analysis of their data shows that the generally Democratic character of "the Catholic vote" will likely continue to be and maybe will be more Democratic.
The only age group that overwhelmingly voted for Trump were Catholics age 75 and older, who went for Trump 57% to 44%. The age groups roughly corresponding to Baby Boomers and Gen Xers split narrowly, with Boomers favoring Trump by two points (49% to 47%) and Xers favoring Clinton by two points (46% to 44%). But Millennial Catholics favored Clinton by a whopping 31% (59% to 28%), by far the largest split of any age group.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the white Catholics who heavily favored Trump in 2016 are what the gerontologists call the “old old.” With life expectancy hovering around 81 for white females and 76 for white males, it doesn’t take a math wiz to figure out that many of these Trump voters won’t be around in 2020 and most will have gone to that great election booth in the sky by 2024.
Whew! I narrowly missed out of being with the goats instead of the sheep on that one, I'm old but not "old old" though none of the "old olds" among the Catholics in my family I'm aware of voted for Trump. One of my oldest Catholic cousins seldom says "Republicans" without the word "dirty" placed before it. Depending on how you cut the crap to find someone to blame I would insist that I am not one of the "white men" who are a more obvious group to pin the blame on because I'm not a "straight white man" but am "LGBT" If not "LGBTQ" though old enough so I will never find the "Q" word acceptable.
Anyway, the fastest growing cohort of Catholics went decisively for Clinton:
Similarly, the Hispanic vote went overwhelmingly for Clinton at 74% to 19%, for a massive 55% advantage. Of course, at least some of this can be accounted for by Trump’s hostility toward Hispanic immigrants and may not carry over to future Republican candidates. But young voters have a tendency to stick with the party they first vote for, so it’s likely that Trump has created a generation of Democratic voters among the fast-growing Latino population.
The election of 2016 also shows that contrary to some predictions, the pro-choice stance of the Democratic Party isn’t a turn off for Hispanic voters. And appeals to some “abortion lite” position is unlikely to sway those white Catholics who are committed to the Republican Party. As Mark Gray, polling director for CARA, noted of the results:
Party comes first for many Catholics and they then try to make that fit within their faith. I don’t mean that in a way that being a Democrat or being a Republican is more important to them than being Catholic. But I mean that at the ballot box, partisanship trumps their faith when they make their choice.
All of this suggests that the election of 2016 was somewhat of a demographic outlier, the last gasp of old white Catholics if you will. Millennials and Hispanics are the future of the Democratic Party. It doesn’t need to contort itself with appeals to conservative religious voters on abortion. Time truly is on the Democrats’ side.
I haven't looked at the figures about what other religious groups slimed in the wake of the election might show. I wonder if the figures considered more reliable will be different from those that everyone was whining about for the past four months.
What isn't on our side is FOX and cabloid news and the Republican-fascist hold on the states and the Supreme Court where they are reinstituting Jim Crow even in places that hardly if ever had it before. The Republican Party is the party of white supremacists, overt fascists, actual Nazis and such folk in places like Michigan and Wisconsin who are a throw-back to the crypto-Nazism of a perversion of Calvinism that produced South African apartheid. But it is, probably most dangerously, the party of the sociopath billionaire boys and girls club and their billions and ability to buy what they want from our corrupt system. They and foreign dictators like Putin have a fleet of hireling lawyers and advisors to allow them to game the stinking corpse of the 18th century Constitution that idiots are paying to worship on Broadway these days figuring lying up make believe history has of the kind that got us here has got something like civic virtue.
But, hey, why let those complicated issues get in the way of a good old fashioned hate-fest like the ones all over the blogs right after the election, based on those phony exit-polls? I'll tell you why, it's dangerous and hard to fight against the real enemy, they're really powerful and a lot of the real things that got us here are the idols of American materialism and lore. It's a lot easier to place the blame on safer easier targets. Like those Trump voters who blamed Black people and Latinos for the billionaires shafting them. People can be such cowards.
Monday, April 10, 2017
Roland Hayes - Reginald Boardman - The Life of Christ in Spirituals - Part 2
Roland Hayes, arranger and tenor
Reginald Boardman, piano
This old classic recording doesn't seem to be available on CD. Which is too bad. There are some spirituals that could have gone into it which Hayes recorded, one which the distinguished critic Richard Dyer called one of the greatest recorded examples of musical drama. I'll post that later this week if I can find it.
Update: Listening to it again, not only was Hayes a great singer, Boardman was a great accompanist. One of the real great musical partnerships that made it into the high fidelity era.
Here's Something You Don't See Every Day I Recommend Something That Was On NPR's Morning Edition
If you want a good example of what I was talking about in regard to cutting corners in science, especially in the biological sciences, you might want to read and listen to the report on Morning Edition this morning about using animals in science as if they can really tell you about human beings - a practice that started out as a professional and financial scheme, developed into a convenience for those purporting to come to conclusions based on the use of animals as substitute humans, turned into a scientific-moralistic platitude which ignored the discrepancy between the claims and the actual facts regarding it and which, now that it is thoroughly ingrained in the way production-line, industrial-academic science is done today, with the full involvement of the various financial interests in keeping it going, will continue despite the science which shows much if not virtually all of it either brushes up against fraud or is actual fraud as science.
When scientists first started using animals in research over a century ago, the animals were not regarded as human stand-ins. Scientists studying rats were initially trying to understand rats, says Todd Preuss, an anthropologist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University.
"As this process went on, people stopped seeing them as specialized animals and started seeing them more and more as prototypical mammals," Preuss says.
But is a rat really a generic mammal? Preuss says emphatically no. But that's how rodents were pitched when they became products sold to scientists.
"It wasn't strictly a financial interest," he says. The sellers "really believed that you could do almost anything" with these animals. "You could learn about almost any feature of human organization, you could cure almost any disease by studying these animals."
[OK, rereading this, I've got to break this in and say if there wasn't "a financial interest" in that, the Salad Master man on TV and those like him didn't have "a financial interest" in what they were doing. And, remember, this guy making this claim is a friggin' anthropologist who is supposed to have a deeper understanding of human thinking and culture than we mere simple lay folk.]
That was a dangerous assumption. Rats and humans have been on their own evolutionary paths for tens of millions of years. We've developed our own unique features, and so have the rodents.
So it should come as no surprise that a drug that works in a mouse often doesn't work in a person. Even so, Preuss says there's tremendous momentum to keep using animals as human substitutes. Entire scientific communities are built up around rats, mice and other lab animals.
"Once these communities exist, then you have an infrastructure of knowledge: how to raise the animals, how to keep them healthy," Preuss says. "You have companies that spring up to provide you with specialized equipment to study these animals."
... Chances are, people studying the same disease study the same tailor-made strain of animal. Journals and funding agencies actually expect it.
"So there's a whole institution that develops," Preuss says.
And it's hard to interrupt that culture. (Preuss gave a talk about this subject in a 2016 talk at the National Institutes of Health.)
A link to the talk is given at NPR but I couldn't get it to work on my computer, maybe it will on yours.
I believe most of what was said in the report, it's part of something I wrote about a number of years back* when I expected it would be more of a shock to people than it has turned out to be. Mostly, I suspect, it's been swept under the rug as so many rather shocking aspects of science and the industries that make money out of them are.
One thing that looks like a logical disconnect to me is in this part of the report.
For neurological diseases, Petsko says, scientists might learn more from studying human cells than whole animals. Animals are still useful for studying the safety of potential new treatments, but beyond that, he says, don't count on them.
Considering the horrible problems that have been caused by a range of problematic, ineffective and dangerous drugs and scandals due to their release based on the alleged safety of them, based primarily on animal studies - many of them to allegedly treat mental illness (which are often generally assumed to be neurological) I wouldn't count on them really being useful studying drug safety. I haven't read anything about the use of animal subjects in other aspect of safety testing so I don't know how reliable they might be for that but I'm pretty skeptical on that count.
Drug companies and the doctors and scientists they pay use animal studies to lie about the safety and effectiveness of drugs and treatment, getting people killed and harmed, to the extent that it probably counts as one of the more serious motives for public skepticism of scientists and the science they do. Tragically, even some of the most valid and important science there is. The oil and gas and coal industries use that phenomenon in their propaganda campaign, as do the Republican-fascists.
As I've noted here before, Max Planck, the great physicist, once said that progress in science wasn't measured in papers, but in the funerals as the old-guard resistant to change died off. Or something to that effect. But corporate interests never die, when a practice like pretending that mice, rats, and other breedable, saleable animals as are used by the tens of thousands and more in the industrial level at which science operates today, is discredited, you can bet that they and the scientists whose reputations and careers depend on it will keep it going. Noam Chomsky, in a video I heard of him, mocked the French for keeping Lamarckian evolution going as a funded academic entity up into recent decades out of nothing more than nationalism, the economic, academic and professional interests in keeping on pretending that animal testing can do what they've got good reason to now believe it can't are certainly stronger.
And don't forget that this has turned into a moral pose by the ideology of modernistic scientism. I can bet that any of the moderny-scientistic types who read this will be outraged that anyone could question the efficacy and the morality of believing in it with all their cold little hearts. But that's mostly pose anyway. If they really believed that science was what they claim to, they'd have no problem reading the studies calling it into question - they are really quite a bit more terrifying than H. P. Lovecraft's crap BECAUSE THEY ARE REAL - and changing their thinking in that regard. I really would prefer to not be part of the cohort whose funerals are a prerequisite for reality to take hold.
* I know I wrote at least one piece about it when I wrote for another blog but I am unable to find that this morning. I assume it's somewhere online so I'll keep trying to find it.
When scientists first started using animals in research over a century ago, the animals were not regarded as human stand-ins. Scientists studying rats were initially trying to understand rats, says Todd Preuss, an anthropologist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University.
"As this process went on, people stopped seeing them as specialized animals and started seeing them more and more as prototypical mammals," Preuss says.
But is a rat really a generic mammal? Preuss says emphatically no. But that's how rodents were pitched when they became products sold to scientists.
"It wasn't strictly a financial interest," he says. The sellers "really believed that you could do almost anything" with these animals. "You could learn about almost any feature of human organization, you could cure almost any disease by studying these animals."
[OK, rereading this, I've got to break this in and say if there wasn't "a financial interest" in that, the Salad Master man on TV and those like him didn't have "a financial interest" in what they were doing. And, remember, this guy making this claim is a friggin' anthropologist who is supposed to have a deeper understanding of human thinking and culture than we mere simple lay folk.]
That was a dangerous assumption. Rats and humans have been on their own evolutionary paths for tens of millions of years. We've developed our own unique features, and so have the rodents.
So it should come as no surprise that a drug that works in a mouse often doesn't work in a person. Even so, Preuss says there's tremendous momentum to keep using animals as human substitutes. Entire scientific communities are built up around rats, mice and other lab animals.
"Once these communities exist, then you have an infrastructure of knowledge: how to raise the animals, how to keep them healthy," Preuss says. "You have companies that spring up to provide you with specialized equipment to study these animals."
... Chances are, people studying the same disease study the same tailor-made strain of animal. Journals and funding agencies actually expect it.
"So there's a whole institution that develops," Preuss says.
And it's hard to interrupt that culture. (Preuss gave a talk about this subject in a 2016 talk at the National Institutes of Health.)
A link to the talk is given at NPR but I couldn't get it to work on my computer, maybe it will on yours.
I believe most of what was said in the report, it's part of something I wrote about a number of years back* when I expected it would be more of a shock to people than it has turned out to be. Mostly, I suspect, it's been swept under the rug as so many rather shocking aspects of science and the industries that make money out of them are.
One thing that looks like a logical disconnect to me is in this part of the report.
For neurological diseases, Petsko says, scientists might learn more from studying human cells than whole animals. Animals are still useful for studying the safety of potential new treatments, but beyond that, he says, don't count on them.
Considering the horrible problems that have been caused by a range of problematic, ineffective and dangerous drugs and scandals due to their release based on the alleged safety of them, based primarily on animal studies - many of them to allegedly treat mental illness (which are often generally assumed to be neurological) I wouldn't count on them really being useful studying drug safety. I haven't read anything about the use of animal subjects in other aspect of safety testing so I don't know how reliable they might be for that but I'm pretty skeptical on that count.
Drug companies and the doctors and scientists they pay use animal studies to lie about the safety and effectiveness of drugs and treatment, getting people killed and harmed, to the extent that it probably counts as one of the more serious motives for public skepticism of scientists and the science they do. Tragically, even some of the most valid and important science there is. The oil and gas and coal industries use that phenomenon in their propaganda campaign, as do the Republican-fascists.
As I've noted here before, Max Planck, the great physicist, once said that progress in science wasn't measured in papers, but in the funerals as the old-guard resistant to change died off. Or something to that effect. But corporate interests never die, when a practice like pretending that mice, rats, and other breedable, saleable animals as are used by the tens of thousands and more in the industrial level at which science operates today, is discredited, you can bet that they and the scientists whose reputations and careers depend on it will keep it going. Noam Chomsky, in a video I heard of him, mocked the French for keeping Lamarckian evolution going as a funded academic entity up into recent decades out of nothing more than nationalism, the economic, academic and professional interests in keeping on pretending that animal testing can do what they've got good reason to now believe it can't are certainly stronger.
And don't forget that this has turned into a moral pose by the ideology of modernistic scientism. I can bet that any of the moderny-scientistic types who read this will be outraged that anyone could question the efficacy and the morality of believing in it with all their cold little hearts. But that's mostly pose anyway. If they really believed that science was what they claim to, they'd have no problem reading the studies calling it into question - they are really quite a bit more terrifying than H. P. Lovecraft's crap BECAUSE THEY ARE REAL - and changing their thinking in that regard. I really would prefer to not be part of the cohort whose funerals are a prerequisite for reality to take hold.
* I know I wrote at least one piece about it when I wrote for another blog but I am unable to find that this morning. I assume it's somewhere online so I'll keep trying to find it.
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Tal Hurwitz - Suita Lirica
Ögmundur þór Jóhannesson, guitar
A few years back I posted a video of the Israeli guitarist Tal Hurwitz playing one of Leo Brouwer's sonatas. I hadn't known until recently that he's also a composer. And a pretty good one if the few things I've been able to listen to are any indication. It's good to see how many ways of making sound on stretched strings the young composers for guitar are incorporating in their basic compositional resources. The results can be very good music.
Update: Simps is trying to bait me with this. I went and looked at his pop-music themed blog to see how many Israeli artists he's posted there and am coming up with none. I'm sure he'll let me know if that's wrong. If he doesn't within the hour I'd say it's a near 100% certainly he hasn't. I know I've posted several fine artists here (I wonder what Tali Rubinstein is doing these days, I'll have to remember to check), as well as the Israel Philharmonic. And that's just off the top of my head. I can't remember if I posted music that Stefan Wolpe wrote while he was there. Maybe I'll look if I have time.
Maybe his blog is restricted. I thought that went out in the 60s. Well, that's where his head is pretty well stuck, he's always been ass backward.
Update 2: That's what you came up with, Simps? Two pieces of American kitsch? Where are the Israeli performers you've posted on your blog? That's what the issue was. What makes me suspect you were a late reader?
Update 3: Well, Simps has been spewing spam at me for well over an hour now, he still hasn't mentioned any Israeli performers he's posted about on his blog. Yet he's trying to bait me over this post which is a good review of Tal Hurwitz, a very fine composer and guitarist who is from Israel.
Simps is a poopy putz.
Update 4: Here are the time stamps from Simp's spam tantrum. starting with last night
steve simels
at 9:32 PM
steve simels
at 2:25 PM
steve simels
at 2:47 PM
steve simels
at 2:48 PM
steve simels
at 3:50 PM
Before the one that denies he's been spewing spam at me for over an hour
steve simels
at 3:51 PM
Apparently he doesn't not only know how time works, he doesn't know how a clock works. I've posted the one from last night, just to show it's there. I might leave it up. If he makes too much of a fuss, I'll just post them all.
Later: He's still at it. The geezer is OCD with more issues than weird Al Portnoy
Later: He's still at it. The geezer is OCD with more issues than weird Al Portnoy
Naw, it wasn't Simps. I doubt he remembers who old Bertie was, if he ever knew.
As to what he said over there, if he exhibited signs of understanding what I'd written I'd have to go back and check it because if he could understand it it's probably false. He is reality resistant unless someone said it in the Village Voice or some once upon a time kewl venue.
If the people who send me hate mail sent stuff that isn't full of false invective, especially about other people but even about me, I have no problem with posting it. But I will not post lies and I'm not under any obligation to post content I don't want to. That doesn't mean I don't get to refute what it accused me of, especially when it's posted elsewhere. I have found very few atheists who are mature enough to make an argument without making it personal and false.
Update: Simps didn't like what I said.
Well, if he meant that Lovecraft, in one letter, revoked his long term anti-semitism but not his even more vicious racism, only that's not what he meant. I told you that he was reality resistant.
Why would he think what they do on a TV show would bother me? Those Murdoch shows with the very sexy Yannick Bisson? He must be getting a bit old to play the part by now, isn't he? I mean, he's no Rich Hobson, these days. I like Bisson and he is certainly eye-candy but I haven't watched one of those in years. As to Lovecraft showing up in one? When did he ever get to Canada? Or did Murdoch move to Providence? As he didn't start writing until the late 1910s, it's kind of a major anachronism to have him doing so around the turn of the century. I doubt he even thought of writing at the time that show was set. Though as so many of the writers for that show did the steam punk junk, that wouldn't stop them from that kind of a stretcher.
I will say that much as I like Yannick Bisson and Helene Joy (I liked her as a victim of syphilis in the movie of Under the Dragon's Tail where the very good Peter Outerbridge played Murdoch), and I like Johnny Harris quite a lot, the show is kind of silly most of the time. I have, actually, read some of the Murdoch novels by Maureen Jennings and, while she did a fair job with period accuracy and writing her characters believably into the time period, they were good to fair. They took major liberties in Under the Dragon's Tail and some in Poor Tom is Cold in the movies, though, Except the Dying made the transition pretty much intact. The book of Dragon's Tail seems to me to carry a lot more of the seediness and grittiness of the 1890s demimonde than the shows. They're way too clean. Murdoch wasn't a scientific tinkerer sleuth in the books, either.
L.R. Wright's Canadian mysteries are pretty good. The Suspect is the best of those I've read.
Update 2: Nope, never heard that Lovecraft went to Quebec once, I can't find anything about it online. Though, looking to fact check it, I found this.
But, more broadly speaking, Lovecraft’s ascendance has also brought an uncomfortable truth into the spotlight: He was a virulent racist. The xenophobia and white supremacy that burble beneath his fiction (which may have gone unnoticed, had he remained anonymous) are startlingly explicit in his letters. Flip through them and you’ll find the author bemoaning Jews as “hook-nosed, swarthy, guttural-voiced aliens” with whom “association ... was intolerable”; New York City’s “flabby, pungent, grinning, chattering niggers”; and New England’s “undesirable Latins—low-grade Southern Italians and Portuguese, and the clamorous plague of French-Canadians.” In 1922, he wrote that he wished “a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion” of New York City’s Chinatown, which he called “a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh.” In another letter, he wrote, “In general, America has made a fine mess of its population and will pay for it in tears amidst a premature rottenness unless something is done extremely soon.”
Sounds like Steve Banon could be his bastard great, grandchild. That is if you can imagine Lovecraft procreating. Now, aren't you glad you poked that hornet's nest? To claim that Lovecraft was a great traveler would seem to be a major fib. Unless you count his brief period in NYC surrounding his marriage, its breakup and his failure to get a job or live a normal life before he fled back to Providence.
Notice that he was another Anglo-Saxon fan of murder by mass gassing well before the Nazis started doing that. In the literary tradition of H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw and Virginia Woolf.
Lovecraft was a piece of crap who wrote crap for people who don't read much but crap.
Update 3: When H. P. Lovecraft lived, was the same period when the great anti-lynching crusader, anti-segregationist Ida Wells Barnett advocated people vote Republican because the Democratic Party contained the segregationist Southerners who prevented the anti-lynching and other civil rights legislation from becoming law. In the depression, as Lovecraft hoped, as so many in the arts and those on the outer fringes of it, hoped for help from the New Deal, he overcame his previous inclinations to support FDR, to some extent on that basis. So, dopey, if you're going to look at history with the same standards as those who write for the Murdoch TV show, you're going to come to the opposite of understanding it. Not that that would bother you if you liked the fiction that resulted.
The Republican Party today, the Party of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Donald Trump, would have a lot more in common with Lovecraft the xenophobic racist and gay hater (yes, he was one of those too) than today's Democratic Party after Lyndon Johnson pushed through laws he would have absolutely hated.
Last Update unless the dolt say something really hilariously clueless (from the same link as above),
But as vexing as Lovecraft’s racism is for fans, his views are also one of the most useful lenses for reading his work. In March, Leslie Klinger delivered a lecture on Lovecraft at Brown University’s Hay Library, home to the world’s largest collection of Lovecraft papers and other materials. Toward the end of his remarks, Klinger—without excusing or defending Lovecraft’s racism—refused to separate it from his achievements. Lovecraft “despised people who weren’t White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” he said. “But that powers the stories ... this sense that he’s alone, that he’s surrounded by enemies and everything is hostile to him. And I think you take away that part of his character, it might make him a much nicer person, but it would destroy the stories.”
The comics writer Alan Moore picks up this subject, as well, in the introduction to Klinger’s book. But first he reminds readers of the seismic social changes that occurred during Lovecraft’s life: women’s suffrage, advances in mankind’s understanding of outer space, the Russian revolution, new highly visible LGBT communities in American cities, and the largest wave of migrants and refugees the U.S. had ever seen. Moore writes,
"In this light it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generate Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world."
Me, I always thought he was a crap writer for people who mostly read crap.
OK, Stupy did it. Simps, I've pointed out that you have absolutely no understanding of how time works but unless Murdoch invented a time machine, that Lovecraft might have visited Quebec (Murdoch is set in Toronto, there is a bit of a difference) three decades after the Murdoch series is set would sort of make my point that having him show up in the series is kind of a stretcher.
Didn't they ever tell you anything about how time works? That some things happen after other things and those things didn't happen before they did? Just how permissive were they in your first grade years?
As to what he said over there, if he exhibited signs of understanding what I'd written I'd have to go back and check it because if he could understand it it's probably false. He is reality resistant unless someone said it in the Village Voice or some once upon a time kewl venue.
If the people who send me hate mail sent stuff that isn't full of false invective, especially about other people but even about me, I have no problem with posting it. But I will not post lies and I'm not under any obligation to post content I don't want to. That doesn't mean I don't get to refute what it accused me of, especially when it's posted elsewhere. I have found very few atheists who are mature enough to make an argument without making it personal and false.
Update: Simps didn't like what I said.
Well, if he meant that Lovecraft, in one letter, revoked his long term anti-semitism but not his even more vicious racism, only that's not what he meant. I told you that he was reality resistant.
Why would he think what they do on a TV show would bother me? Those Murdoch shows with the very sexy Yannick Bisson? He must be getting a bit old to play the part by now, isn't he? I mean, he's no Rich Hobson, these days. I like Bisson and he is certainly eye-candy but I haven't watched one of those in years. As to Lovecraft showing up in one? When did he ever get to Canada? Or did Murdoch move to Providence? As he didn't start writing until the late 1910s, it's kind of a major anachronism to have him doing so around the turn of the century. I doubt he even thought of writing at the time that show was set. Though as so many of the writers for that show did the steam punk junk, that wouldn't stop them from that kind of a stretcher.
I will say that much as I like Yannick Bisson and Helene Joy (I liked her as a victim of syphilis in the movie of Under the Dragon's Tail where the very good Peter Outerbridge played Murdoch), and I like Johnny Harris quite a lot, the show is kind of silly most of the time. I have, actually, read some of the Murdoch novels by Maureen Jennings and, while she did a fair job with period accuracy and writing her characters believably into the time period, they were good to fair. They took major liberties in Under the Dragon's Tail and some in Poor Tom is Cold in the movies, though, Except the Dying made the transition pretty much intact. The book of Dragon's Tail seems to me to carry a lot more of the seediness and grittiness of the 1890s demimonde than the shows. They're way too clean. Murdoch wasn't a scientific tinkerer sleuth in the books, either.
L.R. Wright's Canadian mysteries are pretty good. The Suspect is the best of those I've read.
Update 2: Nope, never heard that Lovecraft went to Quebec once, I can't find anything about it online. Though, looking to fact check it, I found this.
But, more broadly speaking, Lovecraft’s ascendance has also brought an uncomfortable truth into the spotlight: He was a virulent racist. The xenophobia and white supremacy that burble beneath his fiction (which may have gone unnoticed, had he remained anonymous) are startlingly explicit in his letters. Flip through them and you’ll find the author bemoaning Jews as “hook-nosed, swarthy, guttural-voiced aliens” with whom “association ... was intolerable”; New York City’s “flabby, pungent, grinning, chattering niggers”; and New England’s “undesirable Latins—low-grade Southern Italians and Portuguese, and the clamorous plague of French-Canadians.” In 1922, he wrote that he wished “a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion” of New York City’s Chinatown, which he called “a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh.” In another letter, he wrote, “In general, America has made a fine mess of its population and will pay for it in tears amidst a premature rottenness unless something is done extremely soon.”
Sounds like Steve Banon could be his bastard great, grandchild. That is if you can imagine Lovecraft procreating. Now, aren't you glad you poked that hornet's nest? To claim that Lovecraft was a great traveler would seem to be a major fib. Unless you count his brief period in NYC surrounding his marriage, its breakup and his failure to get a job or live a normal life before he fled back to Providence.
Notice that he was another Anglo-Saxon fan of murder by mass gassing well before the Nazis started doing that. In the literary tradition of H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw and Virginia Woolf.
Lovecraft was a piece of crap who wrote crap for people who don't read much but crap.
Update 3: When H. P. Lovecraft lived, was the same period when the great anti-lynching crusader, anti-segregationist Ida Wells Barnett advocated people vote Republican because the Democratic Party contained the segregationist Southerners who prevented the anti-lynching and other civil rights legislation from becoming law. In the depression, as Lovecraft hoped, as so many in the arts and those on the outer fringes of it, hoped for help from the New Deal, he overcame his previous inclinations to support FDR, to some extent on that basis. So, dopey, if you're going to look at history with the same standards as those who write for the Murdoch TV show, you're going to come to the opposite of understanding it. Not that that would bother you if you liked the fiction that resulted.
The Republican Party today, the Party of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Donald Trump, would have a lot more in common with Lovecraft the xenophobic racist and gay hater (yes, he was one of those too) than today's Democratic Party after Lyndon Johnson pushed through laws he would have absolutely hated.
Last Update unless the dolt say something really hilariously clueless (from the same link as above),
But as vexing as Lovecraft’s racism is for fans, his views are also one of the most useful lenses for reading his work. In March, Leslie Klinger delivered a lecture on Lovecraft at Brown University’s Hay Library, home to the world’s largest collection of Lovecraft papers and other materials. Toward the end of his remarks, Klinger—without excusing or defending Lovecraft’s racism—refused to separate it from his achievements. Lovecraft “despised people who weren’t White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” he said. “But that powers the stories ... this sense that he’s alone, that he’s surrounded by enemies and everything is hostile to him. And I think you take away that part of his character, it might make him a much nicer person, but it would destroy the stories.”
The comics writer Alan Moore picks up this subject, as well, in the introduction to Klinger’s book. But first he reminds readers of the seismic social changes that occurred during Lovecraft’s life: women’s suffrage, advances in mankind’s understanding of outer space, the Russian revolution, new highly visible LGBT communities in American cities, and the largest wave of migrants and refugees the U.S. had ever seen. Moore writes,
"In this light it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generate Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world."
Me, I always thought he was a crap writer for people who mostly read crap.
OK, Stupy did it. Simps, I've pointed out that you have absolutely no understanding of how time works but unless Murdoch invented a time machine, that Lovecraft might have visited Quebec (Murdoch is set in Toronto, there is a bit of a difference) three decades after the Murdoch series is set would sort of make my point that having him show up in the series is kind of a stretcher.
Didn't they ever tell you anything about how time works? That some things happen after other things and those things didn't happen before they did? Just how permissive were they in your first grade years?
How Dare You Say That About Bertrand Russell - Really Pissy Hate Mail
If you're not going to bother to read the links to things I write about to see if they provide support for what I said, don't claim they don't show what I claim they do. Bertrand Russell's dishonesty in attributing even the atheist, anti-religious, priest and nun murdering Soviet Communist dictatorship to religion instead of its materialism, its atheism and its scientism is obvious from the first paragraph of that chapter treating the subject, that's why I gave a link to it. I will go through it and the following paragraph to point out his blatant double-speak and his hypocrisy.
The materialistic conception of history, as it is called, is due to Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy. I do not mean, of course, that a man could not be a Communist without accepting it, but that in fact it is accepted by the Communist Party, and that it profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics.
After saying that a "materialistic conception of history" is due to Marx, and underlies his whole Communist philosophy BUT, even though it "profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics" you could, somehow, accept Communism without accepting what it's based in. Let's guess, he wanted to claim that those murders that had already started accumulating under the materialist-Marxist dictatorship of the Marxist, Lenin, weren't really attributable to their materialist view of human lives. At least that's a tacit claim in what he said. The double-speak of that continues and is intensified in his further desire to get the materialism which the foundation of his own faith off the hook for what was developing into a horror that would make the Reign of Terror look like a practice run.
The name [materialism] does not convey at all accurately what is meant by the theory. It means that all the mass-phenomena of history are determined by economic motives. This view has no essential connection with materialism in the philosophic sense. Materialism in the philosophic sense may be defined as the theory that all apparently mental occurrences either are really physical, or at any rate have purely physical causes. Materialism in this sense also was preached by Marx, and is accepted by all orthodox Marxians. The arguments for and against it are long and complicated, and need not concern us, since, in fact, its truth or falsehood has little or no bearing on politics.
Notice that as soon as he denies that Marx's materialist conception of history is the same thing as (his) philosophical materialism (which he later admits is a monist ideology which denies that there is anything which is not thoroughly material) he that that Marx shared his materialist ideology and that he even "preached" it and that such "philosophical" Marxism is accepted by all orthodox Marxians". He goes on
In particular, philosophic materialism does not prove that economic causes are fundamental in politics.
Of course it doesn't "prove" that economic causes are fundamental in politics, as an eminent pure mathematician, Russell knew that such proof would be impossible as it is in everything but mathematics, but that doesn't mean that a materialist could believe that economic causes are fundamental in politics without those economic causes, themselves being a material phenomenon. Not much farther along at on the same page, but in a later paragraph, he said:
For another reason, also, the attempt to base a political theory upon a philosophical doctrine is undesirable. The philosophical doctrine of materialism, if true at all, is true everywhere and always; we cannot expect exceptions to it, say, in Buddhism or in the Hussite movement.
However, shortly before that Russell certainly wanted to get the ideology of materialism off the hook for the results of those Marxists who as "philosophical materialists" must believe that "The philosophical doctrine of materialism" which they held in common with him "if true at all, is true everywhere and always". That insistence that materialism is true everywhere and always is absolutely basic to all materialism. It is to materialism what the belief that God created the heavens and the Earth, all that is visible and invisible, is to theism.
Russell admits that, materialists as materialists "we cannot expect exceptions to it". He even used the first person. He finishes by saying that a materialist cannot even expect that Buddhism or the Hussite movement are exceptions, according to the materialist all must be based in the material substance of the physical world but he started by claiming that though orthodox Marxists were philosophical materialists, as was Marx, but that Marx's materialist conception of history, explicitly called that by Marx, was not attributable to the philosophical materialism he shared with Bertrand Russell. That is typical of Bertrand Russell's style of double speak when dealing not only with materialism and it results but is something he applies in compound form when speaking about what he really loathes, religion. That is something he shares in common with almost all atheists who speak on such matters - off hand, I'm hard pressed to name an exception.
You can see more of it as he continued that second paragraph in the chapter.
The view of Buckle, for example, according to which climate is one of the decisive factors, is equally compatible with materialism. So is the Freudian view, which traces everything to sex. There are innumerable ways of viewing history which are materialistic in the philosophic sense without being economic or falling within the Marxian formula. Thus the "materialistic conception of history" may be false even if materialism in the philosophic sense should be true.
The slight of hand by which Russell lets materialism off the hook, by him removing "economic motives" as defined by the materialist monist Marx from the exclusively material universe that he admitted all philosophical materialists insisted to be the only reality, doing to "economic motives" what he admitted that a materialist couldn't really believe of Buddhism or the religious doctrines of Jan Hus. All he's doing is diverting attention from the fact that the Marxist concentration on, one hand, a materialistic conception of economics by pointing out that other materialists concentrated on other supposedly material phenomena. It's stage magic, deception to dupe his audience to not notice something he doesn't want them to notice.
Bertrand Russell, in full polemical mode, is very good at covering up his frequently audacious dishonesty but you get the feeling he was always expecting a close reader to catch him, eventually - he was a pure mathematician, after all - and he wanted to be able to point out something to claim that he'd admitted what he obviously wanted a less careful reader to not notice as he swayed him to his preferred conclusion. Especially when he, himself, knew what he wanted was unsupported by the actual evidence and rigorous consideration of the issues. A really good example of how audacious he could be in a long stream of double-talk from later in the chapter
Treated as a practical approximation, not as an exact metaphysical law, the materialistic conception of history has a very large measure of truth. Take, as an instance of its truth, the influence of industrialism upon ideas. It is industrialism, rather than the arguments of Darwinians and Biblical critics, that has led to the decay of religious belief in the urban working class. At the same time, industrialism has revived religious belief among the rich. In the eighteenth century French aristocrats mostly became free-thinkers; now their descendants are mostly Catholics, because it has become necessary for all the forces of reaction to unite against the revolutionary proletariat. Take, again, the emancipation of women. Plato, Mary Wolstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill produced admirable arguments, but influenced only a few impotent idealists. The war came, leading to the employment of women in industry on a large scale, and instantly the arguments in favour of votes for women were seen to be irresistible. More than that, traditional sexual morality collapsed, because its whole basis was the economic dependence of women upon their fathers and husbands. Changes in such a matter as sexual morality bring with them profound alterations in the thoughts and feelings of ordinary men and women; they modify law, literature, art, and all kinds of institutions that seem remote from economics.
In piling on a large number of issues, not as real phenomena in real lives of real people living in communities within countries or in any detail but as icons, as static tableaux or as Hogarth would have drawn them, chosen and distorted for polemical purposes, not in an honest attempt to understand them, Russell is a good example of that style of argument and ideological advocacy. It is totally dishonest, not infrequently appealing to reliably present superstitions and prejudice, and you would expect someone with any regard for the idealized obligations of scientists to match their evidence to the phenomena in the physical world they are characterizing to do better at it. But that scientific ideal is exactly what was broken down by the materialist - atheist hijacking of science for their ideological purposes, even as they performed the pantomime of elevating science to the position of ultimate authority with total potency. That is ever more true as the complexity of what is treated with such atheist-scientistic polemics grows.
The fact of having huge amounts of the writings of many of the major figures in the recent past available, online, for free, in convenient, easily searchable form has had a radical effect on my opinion of many of them which I got from the presentation of them in secondary literature, often polemical as well. The idea I maintained of some, like Emma Goldman, who I admired when mostly known to me by some well chosen, radically clipped aphorisms, has shattered completely upon reading a large amount of what they wrote. She was hardly a great egalitarian, a great humanitarian, she was a rather vicious, entirely impractical, snobbish zealot and more than slightly blood thirsty. When, at the end of her life, on seeing the rise of the Nazis, she asked some of her friends if she had wasted it on her insane, irrational and absurd anarchism, the only honest answer was that she had not only wasted it, her political irresponsibility had hurt the cause of workers and others. Finding out that such a person could be an admirer of the proto-Nazi misogynist and ultimate denier of equality, Nietzsche, was an enormous shock to me and showed me how much of the lefty catechism I'd absorbed through the pseudo-lefties was complete bull shit.
The other major iconic figure of my youth and early middle-age to fall was Bertrand Russell who I now regard as a, perhaps, less violent but equally dishonest intellectual. He was a far more subtle liar and hypocrite when he, so often, operated in that vein. And most of his writing that was influential on the alleged left were exactly those things which were the most dishonest. I see him as just being an especially skilled practitioner of the British-aristocratic style of social commentary, a very traditional aristocratic style British polemicist of the kind who had a distaste for Christianity because it impinged on both their privileges and their preferred social and ideological expectations. Not to say a dislike of anything but that which was materially advantageous, the real basis of that style. As such he was one in a line of Russells of that sort. He made the most of a show of noblesse oblige, as suited the aristocratic British artificial substitute for liberalism that the putrid, cruel or at least cold and horrible Fabians did and still practice.
I might take what Russell says about mathematics as authoritative, the rest of his stuff doesn't much stand up to close review and fact checking. I think I mostly admired him for his opposition to nuclear weapons, one of major contributions of the hard sciences during his life time. I'll grant him that much.
The materialistic conception of history, as it is called, is due to Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy. I do not mean, of course, that a man could not be a Communist without accepting it, but that in fact it is accepted by the Communist Party, and that it profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics.
After saying that a "materialistic conception of history" is due to Marx, and underlies his whole Communist philosophy BUT, even though it "profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics" you could, somehow, accept Communism without accepting what it's based in. Let's guess, he wanted to claim that those murders that had already started accumulating under the materialist-Marxist dictatorship of the Marxist, Lenin, weren't really attributable to their materialist view of human lives. At least that's a tacit claim in what he said. The double-speak of that continues and is intensified in his further desire to get the materialism which the foundation of his own faith off the hook for what was developing into a horror that would make the Reign of Terror look like a practice run.
The name [materialism] does not convey at all accurately what is meant by the theory. It means that all the mass-phenomena of history are determined by economic motives. This view has no essential connection with materialism in the philosophic sense. Materialism in the philosophic sense may be defined as the theory that all apparently mental occurrences either are really physical, or at any rate have purely physical causes. Materialism in this sense also was preached by Marx, and is accepted by all orthodox Marxians. The arguments for and against it are long and complicated, and need not concern us, since, in fact, its truth or falsehood has little or no bearing on politics.
Notice that as soon as he denies that Marx's materialist conception of history is the same thing as (his) philosophical materialism (which he later admits is a monist ideology which denies that there is anything which is not thoroughly material) he that that Marx shared his materialist ideology and that he even "preached" it and that such "philosophical" Marxism is accepted by all orthodox Marxians". He goes on
In particular, philosophic materialism does not prove that economic causes are fundamental in politics.
Of course it doesn't "prove" that economic causes are fundamental in politics, as an eminent pure mathematician, Russell knew that such proof would be impossible as it is in everything but mathematics, but that doesn't mean that a materialist could believe that economic causes are fundamental in politics without those economic causes, themselves being a material phenomenon. Not much farther along at on the same page, but in a later paragraph, he said:
For another reason, also, the attempt to base a political theory upon a philosophical doctrine is undesirable. The philosophical doctrine of materialism, if true at all, is true everywhere and always; we cannot expect exceptions to it, say, in Buddhism or in the Hussite movement.
However, shortly before that Russell certainly wanted to get the ideology of materialism off the hook for the results of those Marxists who as "philosophical materialists" must believe that "The philosophical doctrine of materialism" which they held in common with him "if true at all, is true everywhere and always". That insistence that materialism is true everywhere and always is absolutely basic to all materialism. It is to materialism what the belief that God created the heavens and the Earth, all that is visible and invisible, is to theism.
Russell admits that, materialists as materialists "we cannot expect exceptions to it". He even used the first person. He finishes by saying that a materialist cannot even expect that Buddhism or the Hussite movement are exceptions, according to the materialist all must be based in the material substance of the physical world but he started by claiming that though orthodox Marxists were philosophical materialists, as was Marx, but that Marx's materialist conception of history, explicitly called that by Marx, was not attributable to the philosophical materialism he shared with Bertrand Russell. That is typical of Bertrand Russell's style of double speak when dealing not only with materialism and it results but is something he applies in compound form when speaking about what he really loathes, religion. That is something he shares in common with almost all atheists who speak on such matters - off hand, I'm hard pressed to name an exception.
You can see more of it as he continued that second paragraph in the chapter.
The view of Buckle, for example, according to which climate is one of the decisive factors, is equally compatible with materialism. So is the Freudian view, which traces everything to sex. There are innumerable ways of viewing history which are materialistic in the philosophic sense without being economic or falling within the Marxian formula. Thus the "materialistic conception of history" may be false even if materialism in the philosophic sense should be true.
The slight of hand by which Russell lets materialism off the hook, by him removing "economic motives" as defined by the materialist monist Marx from the exclusively material universe that he admitted all philosophical materialists insisted to be the only reality, doing to "economic motives" what he admitted that a materialist couldn't really believe of Buddhism or the religious doctrines of Jan Hus. All he's doing is diverting attention from the fact that the Marxist concentration on, one hand, a materialistic conception of economics by pointing out that other materialists concentrated on other supposedly material phenomena. It's stage magic, deception to dupe his audience to not notice something he doesn't want them to notice.
Bertrand Russell, in full polemical mode, is very good at covering up his frequently audacious dishonesty but you get the feeling he was always expecting a close reader to catch him, eventually - he was a pure mathematician, after all - and he wanted to be able to point out something to claim that he'd admitted what he obviously wanted a less careful reader to not notice as he swayed him to his preferred conclusion. Especially when he, himself, knew what he wanted was unsupported by the actual evidence and rigorous consideration of the issues. A really good example of how audacious he could be in a long stream of double-talk from later in the chapter
Treated as a practical approximation, not as an exact metaphysical law, the materialistic conception of history has a very large measure of truth. Take, as an instance of its truth, the influence of industrialism upon ideas. It is industrialism, rather than the arguments of Darwinians and Biblical critics, that has led to the decay of religious belief in the urban working class. At the same time, industrialism has revived religious belief among the rich. In the eighteenth century French aristocrats mostly became free-thinkers; now their descendants are mostly Catholics, because it has become necessary for all the forces of reaction to unite against the revolutionary proletariat. Take, again, the emancipation of women. Plato, Mary Wolstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill produced admirable arguments, but influenced only a few impotent idealists. The war came, leading to the employment of women in industry on a large scale, and instantly the arguments in favour of votes for women were seen to be irresistible. More than that, traditional sexual morality collapsed, because its whole basis was the economic dependence of women upon their fathers and husbands. Changes in such a matter as sexual morality bring with them profound alterations in the thoughts and feelings of ordinary men and women; they modify law, literature, art, and all kinds of institutions that seem remote from economics.
In piling on a large number of issues, not as real phenomena in real lives of real people living in communities within countries or in any detail but as icons, as static tableaux or as Hogarth would have drawn them, chosen and distorted for polemical purposes, not in an honest attempt to understand them, Russell is a good example of that style of argument and ideological advocacy. It is totally dishonest, not infrequently appealing to reliably present superstitions and prejudice, and you would expect someone with any regard for the idealized obligations of scientists to match their evidence to the phenomena in the physical world they are characterizing to do better at it. But that scientific ideal is exactly what was broken down by the materialist - atheist hijacking of science for their ideological purposes, even as they performed the pantomime of elevating science to the position of ultimate authority with total potency. That is ever more true as the complexity of what is treated with such atheist-scientistic polemics grows.
The fact of having huge amounts of the writings of many of the major figures in the recent past available, online, for free, in convenient, easily searchable form has had a radical effect on my opinion of many of them which I got from the presentation of them in secondary literature, often polemical as well. The idea I maintained of some, like Emma Goldman, who I admired when mostly known to me by some well chosen, radically clipped aphorisms, has shattered completely upon reading a large amount of what they wrote. She was hardly a great egalitarian, a great humanitarian, she was a rather vicious, entirely impractical, snobbish zealot and more than slightly blood thirsty. When, at the end of her life, on seeing the rise of the Nazis, she asked some of her friends if she had wasted it on her insane, irrational and absurd anarchism, the only honest answer was that she had not only wasted it, her political irresponsibility had hurt the cause of workers and others. Finding out that such a person could be an admirer of the proto-Nazi misogynist and ultimate denier of equality, Nietzsche, was an enormous shock to me and showed me how much of the lefty catechism I'd absorbed through the pseudo-lefties was complete bull shit.
The other major iconic figure of my youth and early middle-age to fall was Bertrand Russell who I now regard as a, perhaps, less violent but equally dishonest intellectual. He was a far more subtle liar and hypocrite when he, so often, operated in that vein. And most of his writing that was influential on the alleged left were exactly those things which were the most dishonest. I see him as just being an especially skilled practitioner of the British-aristocratic style of social commentary, a very traditional aristocratic style British polemicist of the kind who had a distaste for Christianity because it impinged on both their privileges and their preferred social and ideological expectations. Not to say a dislike of anything but that which was materially advantageous, the real basis of that style. As such he was one in a line of Russells of that sort. He made the most of a show of noblesse oblige, as suited the aristocratic British artificial substitute for liberalism that the putrid, cruel or at least cold and horrible Fabians did and still practice.
I might take what Russell says about mathematics as authoritative, the rest of his stuff doesn't much stand up to close review and fact checking. I think I mostly admired him for his opposition to nuclear weapons, one of major contributions of the hard sciences during his life time. I'll grant him that much.
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