It's so embarrassing to have a president who doesn't understand that you don't leave a presidential note in the guest book at Yad Vashem that sounds like some especially unintelligent Las Vegas celebrity writing an autograph out when they weren't pressed for time.
It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends. So amazing + will Never Forget!
So amazing? +? will Never Forget!?
Yeesh!
Trump has done more to diminish the respect the United States is held in than anyone since Bush II illegally invaded Iraq to such disastrous effect. Maybe more.
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
"You've gone soft on Coyne"
It would probably be more easily satisfying to just hate on him and pretend he was totally evil and deserving of hate but it wouldn't be honest and there's a moral obligation to be honest. Like us all, there is that but anyone who is against murdering elephants or stoning people can't be all bad.
And, while it's something I'll probably have to work on the rest of my life and probably won't do in whatever time I've got left, this passage from The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. is certainly worth meditating on.
The Greek language comes out with another word for love. It is the word agape. And agape is more than eros; agape is more than philia; agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them. You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst person you’ve ever seen.
And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, "Love your enemy." And it’s significant that he does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.
I can't say I love Jerry Coyne, though I've got a religious obligation to work on it. I certainly don't like him and probably never will without one or the other of us radically changing. But my choice to convert, as an adult, not as a result of my baptism as a two-week old, carries obligations that I take seriously. The obligation is to try to live up to it, not to pretend I have.
I don't see that as in any way preventing me from mocking the trolls. Or Trump.
And, while it's something I'll probably have to work on the rest of my life and probably won't do in whatever time I've got left, this passage from The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. is certainly worth meditating on.
The Greek language comes out with another word for love. It is the word agape. And agape is more than eros; agape is more than philia; agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them. You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst person you’ve ever seen.
And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, "Love your enemy." And it’s significant that he does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.
I can't say I love Jerry Coyne, though I've got a religious obligation to work on it. I certainly don't like him and probably never will without one or the other of us radically changing. But my choice to convert, as an adult, not as a result of my baptism as a two-week old, carries obligations that I take seriously. The obligation is to try to live up to it, not to pretend I have.
I don't see that as in any way preventing me from mocking the trolls. Or Trump.
Still Going Through My Head - Rogers and Hart - This Can't Be Love
Clifford David - Antipholus of Ephesus
Julienne Marie - Luciana
Despite what the LP cover says, it isn't the "original cast" it's the 1963 cast, which is pretty good. Especially as you get the seldom sung verse.
And here it is sung by the great Peggy Lee
I believe it's her singing with her husband, the guitarist Dave Barbour's trio though I spent all my time looking up who sang it above.
I'm not a huge fan of Richard Roger's songs but this is one of the rare ones I really like.
Oh, Simps cherry picking and quote clipping to distort what I said is nothing new. Nothing he does is new. He made a career in what gets called "journalism" out of those. It's a rare critic who does much more than repeat the opinions of their fellow leeches, hoping the ones he chooses are the right ones and not the ones that are sufficiently, unstylishly original or sincere so as to diminish their status and saleability. It's good training to become a blog troll.
Actually, In Some Ways I Find Something Admirable About Jerry Coyne Though I Don't Like Him
Though I really do rather dislike the man, rather intensely, there are certainly things I agree with Jerry Coyne about very strongly. Looking at the recent items at his blog, I certainly condemn the putrid Theresa May and her unspeakable Tory party for even thinking about allowing the sale of elephant ivory in Britain as part of their campaign to allow the 1% their traditional luxuries and ways of making money and depravities like fox hunting.
I certainly agree with him that Sharia Law should not replace civil law and that it contains unacceptable evils and barbarities, most of all that such barbarities as stoning and dismemberment are absolutely evil and should never be practiced by any government or society, anywhere. I will point out that I believe many contemporary Muslims would certainly agree with that, probably far more than who would articulate that position. Many, even some quite devout Muslims are as civilized as even many university professors, somehow, manage to be.
I think Jerry Coyne's dependence on opinion polling to come up with figures on that is rather blatantly superstitious. That kind of opinion polling is roughly the modern equivalent of reading a horoscope. I have no confidence that the actual percentage of a population who favors something like that, especially as an abstract instead idea instead of an actual fact can be discerned or that it would be a consistent number that you could depend on being the same day to day, never mind over the course of months or even years during which those phony numbers are cited. The volatility of the American and French electorates are certainly indicative of the unreliability of that stuff.
I think Jerry Coyne's dependence on opinion polling to come up with figures on that is rather blatantly superstitious. That kind of opinion polling is roughly the modern equivalent of reading a horoscope. I have no confidence that the actual percentage of a population who favors something like that, especially as an abstract instead idea instead of an actual fact can be discerned or that it would be a consistent number that you could depend on being the same day to day, never mind over the course of months or even years during which those phony numbers are cited. The volatility of the American and French electorates are certainly indicative of the unreliability of that stuff.
But when Jerry Coyne takes a moral stand like that he is not doing so out of his materialist-atheist-scientistic faith, he has to exit it temporarily to listen to his better angels and take a moral position. Materialism, scientism, atheism, none of those have anything in them that you could begin to make any moral stand out of, nor anything to base a call for other people to either adopt or constrain their own behavior on. Materialism-atheism-scientism have everything in them that weakens a call for any position of morality because all of them either deny the possibility of durable, moral absolutes or to say that they are irrelevant to anyone who doesn't want to accept them.
As an ultra-Darwinist even his entirely laudable calls for halting the extinction of elephants is inconsistent with both Darwin and the way of current evolutionary psychology, another massively held superstition among the sciency, educated class of the English speaking peoples. Darwin certainly had no problem with human caused extinction, there is that infamous passage in The Descent of Man which I've cited a number of times, the one in which he, so far as I've been able to discover, he lied about what Hermann Schaaffhausen said so as to claim that there would be some great benefit to the extinction of the great apes and many racial groups of human beings at the hands of superior human groups.
I will not get far into the relationship of scientific vivisection to these issues, right now, though I don't see how you cannot at least think about the morality of how animals are used, tortured and killed in the millions in the name of science - quite a bit of it of rather obvious bogosity, done so someone can get published or paid by industry. Much of it is all about the scientist-sadist making money.
The current alleged origin and character of morals by Coyne and his fellow atheists under the Just-so story telling of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, that it is some kind of trait that has survived in the human species because it confers some kind of advantage in human survival and reproduction is complete nonsense. Again, it is nonsense that you can also find in The Descent of Man. The extinction of the mega fauna and so many other species of the Americas and elsewhere was mostly at the hands of human beings. Considering that natural selection not only allows for but, in its classical elucidation, consists of imaginary struggles for existence in which not only sub groups within species but entire species are wiped out by those who are able to kill them, it never did make any sense to attribute even the most unambiguous aspects of morality to it. The emotional attachment of the atheists who came up with that nonsense to the requirements of maintaining their materialism blinded them to the absurdities of what they were arguing. I've found that when pressed on these issues they will not appeal to any kind of evidence, they will insist that it has to be that way because, in the end, as in the beginning, it MUST be like that because.... materialism has to be the answer to everything.
I am glad that on those things we can agree, Jerry Coyne is as passionately, emotionally, devoted to his moral positions. I don't think there's anything wrong with that so long as the preservation of animals and the rights of human beings are the goal. After my criticism of him over several days, I think it's only right to praise his moral passion for those things we agree on, entirely. I wish so many of his fellow atheists weren't led by their slacker, lazy assed and more vulgar materialism into amoral libertarianism instead. But, it's clear that their amorality is more in keeping with materialism, scientism and atheism.
Not everyone who adopts those can be counted on to have a moral passion that overrides the typical positions of materialism. the personal hedonism attributed to Carvarka and some other Indian schools of atheist materialism, that is found in some European schools of materialism, as well. I can't find the quote but in the recent enthusiasm over Lucretius it seemed to be the real motive behind the university prof who promoted it. The appeal of pleasure is intrinsic to much of evil. After all, that is a temptation which is very hard to resist even for those whose claims of Christianity should provide them with far stronger reasons to resist temptation but which they often give into. They should have every reason in the world to do what Jesus taught. I have come to believe that politically, in societies, it is exactly the percentage of people who do take those moral absolutes as binding obligations on everyone which provides the margin of difference in whether or not there is a decent, democratic government or not. I think in the depravity of the British upper class which has obviously duped the majority of voters in England is demonstrating what happens to a quasi-democracy when that margin which takes Christian morality as serious and morally binding declines. I think that we have seen in the alleged Christians who voted for Trump, largely at the urging of the Aussie-Brit Rupert Murdoch imported to do exactly that during the Reagan years and others like him, something similar.
Update: I was referring to that meat-head Stephen Greenblatt's ridiculous and absurdly popular book, "The Swerve" which is a combination of long ago debunked "dark ages" mythology which was always motivated, not by historical accuracy but by anti-religious, much of it anti-Catholic polemics.
This review in not the NYT but in the LA one, by Jim Hinch is a critique of some of Greenblatt's blatant distortions and that of his fans, high placed and lower ones as well. Personally, I think Greenblatt was just cashing in on the anti-religion, atheism fad. You can always count on good reviews for bashing religion by idiots who never fact check or have the first idea of what they're talking about. Especially the kind who are on book juries and who spend their time writing reviews and doing interviews.
Rereading this update, OK, I admit it, I originally didn't use the word "meat". I changed three letters.
Update: I was referring to that meat-head Stephen Greenblatt's ridiculous and absurdly popular book, "The Swerve" which is a combination of long ago debunked "dark ages" mythology which was always motivated, not by historical accuracy but by anti-religious, much of it anti-Catholic polemics.
This review in not the NYT but in the LA one, by Jim Hinch is a critique of some of Greenblatt's blatant distortions and that of his fans, high placed and lower ones as well. Personally, I think Greenblatt was just cashing in on the anti-religion, atheism fad. You can always count on good reviews for bashing religion by idiots who never fact check or have the first idea of what they're talking about. Especially the kind who are on book juries and who spend their time writing reviews and doing interviews.
Rereading this update, OK, I admit it, I originally didn't use the word "meat". I changed three letters.
Monday, May 22, 2017
This is How Low the Trump Apologists Will Stoop
If you haven't watched any of the other Keith Olbermann videos I've posted, please, watch this one. The Trump lie campaign through FOX and crap like Gingrich is absolutely the lowest of the low.
Short Answer To A Whine
I used to always use CE (common era) and BCE (before the common era) to annoy fundamentalists.
Now I use those when I want to annoy fundamentalists and BC and AD when I want to annoy atheists and their allies.
That's how you can tell who I want to annoy when I use those.
For more information, I try to remember to use First and Second Testament because there's no place I can see that the first one was withdrawn. But it's my experience that the clueless are even more clueless when that's done.
Now I use those when I want to annoy fundamentalists and BC and AD when I want to annoy atheists and their allies.
That's how you can tell who I want to annoy when I use those.
For more information, I try to remember to use First and Second Testament because there's no place I can see that the first one was withdrawn. But it's my experience that the clueless are even more clueless when that's done.
Dinah Washington - This Can't Be Love
This song has been going through my head ever since I listened to that Bob and Ray show posted here last night.
Clark Terry (trumpet)
Cecil Payne (baritone saxophone)
Jimmy Cleveland (trombone)
Wynton Kelly (piano)
Barry Galbraith (guitar)
Keter Betts (bass)
Jimmy Cobb (drums)
I met Clark Terry, a great musician and a really nice guy.
And He Arose Dame Donald
Dame Donald
Dame Penelope Keith
Dame Fergie
Update: I was looking for a picture of Simp's favorite, Dame Barbara Cartland but couldn't find one back when she could still do the Dame Donald thing.
Update 2: Oh, Simps is upset that I committed a lapse of quasi-royal protocol. I'm sorry, Simps, I'm not as daddled for the Royals as you obviously are. He's so sensitive about that kind of thing.
Update 2: Oh, Simps is upset that I committed a lapse of quasi-royal protocol. I'm sorry, Simps, I'm not as daddled for the Royals as you obviously are. He's so sensitive about that kind of thing.
Oh, The Sorrow And Pity - Donald Does Yad Vashem
The news is that Donald Trump insisted that his Israeli itinerary include no more than a quarter of an hour at Yad Vashem. Which is, of course, offensive. And it should be considered outrageous that a 70-year-old man obviously doesn't want to go there because, no doubt, he thinks:
"That's booooorrrrriiinnng!"
How insulting is it?
How will the president use these precious 15 minutes? Ynet reports that he will hear an explanation and sign the museum’s guest book.
The Jerusalem Post took an uncharacteristic snarky approach and produced a video demonstrating what Trump will be able to cover in 15 minutes at the 45-acre complex. The paper quoted Israeli officials saying that an hour and a half is the “bare minimum” needed for a visit to the museum.
I guess there are some places you can't strategically plant Trump's name so you can keep his attention focused on it.
You have to wonder if it wasn't a choice by his staff because they were terrified about what Donald Trump might say during or about a visit to the Holocaust memorial. He is entirely capable of saying something outrageously offensive and have not a glimmer of an inkling of why what he said is offensive. I wonder if he ever heard of Yad Vashem before, I wonder if he knows what the Holocaust was.
Donald Trump is such an embarrassment and shame for the United States. He's the man who put Steve Bannon in the White House, who named Sean Spicer as his spokesman. The man who appointed a neo-Nazi to his regime.
"That's booooorrrrriiinnng!"
How insulting is it?
How will the president use these precious 15 minutes? Ynet reports that he will hear an explanation and sign the museum’s guest book.
The Jerusalem Post took an uncharacteristic snarky approach and produced a video demonstrating what Trump will be able to cover in 15 minutes at the 45-acre complex. The paper quoted Israeli officials saying that an hour and a half is the “bare minimum” needed for a visit to the museum.
I guess there are some places you can't strategically plant Trump's name so you can keep his attention focused on it.
You have to wonder if it wasn't a choice by his staff because they were terrified about what Donald Trump might say during or about a visit to the Holocaust memorial. He is entirely capable of saying something outrageously offensive and have not a glimmer of an inkling of why what he said is offensive. I wonder if he ever heard of Yad Vashem before, I wonder if he knows what the Holocaust was.
Donald Trump is such an embarrassment and shame for the United States. He's the man who put Steve Bannon in the White House, who named Sean Spicer as his spokesman. The man who appointed a neo-Nazi to his regime.
Hate Mail - All Or Nothing Works A Lot Better For The Bill of Rights Than It Does The Bible
I am asked why, if the 6-day creation fable isn't literally true why anyone should believe the 10 Commandments. Well, do you want someone who really hates you to not believe that thou shalt not kill? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors goods? Someone who sleeps around and has a very high probability of carrying an incurable STD and want to covet your spouse or partner or whatever figure there's no prohibition against it? Well, I'll grant that some of these ideas are sufficiently involved so as to tax the attention span of, apparently, many.
The Bible is a very large number of texts by a very large number of people over a very large number of years, times, cultural milieus and, I'd say, of varying levels of inspiration. It is an anthology and the cultural expectations under which those texts were written and the audiences and expectations of how the authors thought the texts would be taken varies, as well. Some of it is to be taken quite literally, thou shalt not kill, for example. Though, in the way of people, exceptions to that were sought and the texts contain those, even claiming that God ordered them to kill people. I certainly don't believe that God ever told anyone to commit genocide as is contained in Exodus and other books of the collection.
People seem to be able to ignore it with no problem when quite specific commandments aren't in any way contradicted in the collection. Especially the commandments to treat the poor, the dispossessed, THE ALIEN LIVING AMONG YOU, as you would want to be treated yourself. Even people who believe themselves to be Biblical literalists don't seem to have any problem ignoring those far more frequently given justice commandments.
I wish, with all my heart, that I'd not become an agnostic by the time that Walter Brueggemann was writing his early works because if I'd read his way of reading the Bible, informed by his own intense scholarship and that of his predecessors, in which all of those contexts are considered and taken into account, I could have been learning from texts I'd pretty much put aside to read things like the literature that includes the materialism of Carvarka. Though, who knows, maybe I was led that way so I could make the point I did yesterday.
Do you want to give up the items in the Bill of Rights because the same document, written by and adopted by the same people who wrote and adopted it embedded slavery, discrimination against women, the enhancement of the rights of the rich and the propertied, the idiotic anti-democratic Electoral College that produced both George W. Bush and Donald Trump as presidents? They all did that in the same room, at the same time, not removed by centuries, cultures and literary forms. That question makes a lot more sense than insisting that you have to accept every word of the Bible as literally true or you have to reject all of it. But sense doesn't seem to enter into your question. Or much in the way of having read the thing.
Update: No, I wouldn't kill you if it didn't say that in the 10 Commandments, I wouldn't even pull the plug on you just to get you off line. Though if this were vaudeville, I might get the hook to get you off stage for the good of the show. You're a schmuck but you're not on the list of those I'd contemplate killing. You're not dangerous.
Update 2: So the answer is yes, you think I should kill you and, yes, you should give up the Bill of Rights because of the ban on abolishing slavery, the slave holder enabling 3/5th rule, the unrepresentative Senate that gives the residents of some of our most benighted states 20 times the political strength of the residents of California, that disenfranchised women, the stinking Electoral College that gave us Bush II and Trump?
Somehow, I don't think you're being consistent. If I were you I'd accuse you of having endorsed Al Haig for president right about now because you're a celebrity addled Mort Sahl fan boy. Because that's how your twisted thinking works. Me, I figure that, as Brueggemann and virtually all responsible Biblical scholarship holds now and an impressive amount of it has held for millennia that you can't understand the scriptures literally the way you would believe what ....... TigerBeat or its groovy NYC equivalent prints.
Wait! Village Voice. That's the rag I was trying to remember the name of. Allergy meds. They make me think like an Eschatot an hour after I have to take them.
Update 3: A. The Bible was written by people of varying inspiration, which I'll go into later because I'm drug addled enough to mock you but some things take more clarity. B. The Constitution and the founders are worshiped as divine writ, the ACLU as well as the Federalist Society, some members of the Supreme Court and a myriad of those in the scribbling class treat it as such. You got your knickers in a twist when I made fun of the current pop-kulcha idol among them, Hamilton. Or, rather, Lin Manuel Miranda's phony rapping, boogying, what is it like seven-hundred a ticket fictionalized version of the jerk and his slave-holding wife and sister-in-law. Geesh, put satin and a spot light on anything with a crappy book and score and it turns into a god for you guys.
Update 4: Hey, you don't have to take my word for that. Read this passage from Ishmael Reed's take on Hamilton. Note, especially that last line.
Establishment historians write best sellers in which some of the cruel actions of the Founding Fathers are smudged over if not ignored altogether. They’re guilty of a cover-up.
This is the case with Alexander Hamilton whose life has been scrubbed with a kind of historical Ajax until it sparkles. His reputation has been shored up as an abolitionist and someone who was opposed to slavery. Not true.
Alexander Hamilton married into the Schuylers, a slaveholding family, and participated in the bartering of slaves. One of “Hamilton’s” actors, Renee Elise Goldsberry (“The Color Purple”), who visited the Schuyler home, said the Schuyler sisters, “were the Kardashians” of 1780 — superstars, but with dignity and grace.” Maybe they were able to maintain “dignity and grace” because they had 27 slaves serve them. Black women whose labor assignments left them little time to preen. Is this actor disregarding, callously, that the sisters thrived on the labor of enslaved women? No, she probably attended the same schools that I attended. A curriculum that endowed slave traders and Indian exterminators with the status of deities.
The Bible is a very large number of texts by a very large number of people over a very large number of years, times, cultural milieus and, I'd say, of varying levels of inspiration. It is an anthology and the cultural expectations under which those texts were written and the audiences and expectations of how the authors thought the texts would be taken varies, as well. Some of it is to be taken quite literally, thou shalt not kill, for example. Though, in the way of people, exceptions to that were sought and the texts contain those, even claiming that God ordered them to kill people. I certainly don't believe that God ever told anyone to commit genocide as is contained in Exodus and other books of the collection.
People seem to be able to ignore it with no problem when quite specific commandments aren't in any way contradicted in the collection. Especially the commandments to treat the poor, the dispossessed, THE ALIEN LIVING AMONG YOU, as you would want to be treated yourself. Even people who believe themselves to be Biblical literalists don't seem to have any problem ignoring those far more frequently given justice commandments.
I wish, with all my heart, that I'd not become an agnostic by the time that Walter Brueggemann was writing his early works because if I'd read his way of reading the Bible, informed by his own intense scholarship and that of his predecessors, in which all of those contexts are considered and taken into account, I could have been learning from texts I'd pretty much put aside to read things like the literature that includes the materialism of Carvarka. Though, who knows, maybe I was led that way so I could make the point I did yesterday.
Do you want to give up the items in the Bill of Rights because the same document, written by and adopted by the same people who wrote and adopted it embedded slavery, discrimination against women, the enhancement of the rights of the rich and the propertied, the idiotic anti-democratic Electoral College that produced both George W. Bush and Donald Trump as presidents? They all did that in the same room, at the same time, not removed by centuries, cultures and literary forms. That question makes a lot more sense than insisting that you have to accept every word of the Bible as literally true or you have to reject all of it. But sense doesn't seem to enter into your question. Or much in the way of having read the thing.
Update: No, I wouldn't kill you if it didn't say that in the 10 Commandments, I wouldn't even pull the plug on you just to get you off line. Though if this were vaudeville, I might get the hook to get you off stage for the good of the show. You're a schmuck but you're not on the list of those I'd contemplate killing. You're not dangerous.
Update 2: So the answer is yes, you think I should kill you and, yes, you should give up the Bill of Rights because of the ban on abolishing slavery, the slave holder enabling 3/5th rule, the unrepresentative Senate that gives the residents of some of our most benighted states 20 times the political strength of the residents of California, that disenfranchised women, the stinking Electoral College that gave us Bush II and Trump?
Somehow, I don't think you're being consistent. If I were you I'd accuse you of having endorsed Al Haig for president right about now because you're a celebrity addled Mort Sahl fan boy. Because that's how your twisted thinking works. Me, I figure that, as Brueggemann and virtually all responsible Biblical scholarship holds now and an impressive amount of it has held for millennia that you can't understand the scriptures literally the way you would believe what ....... TigerBeat or its groovy NYC equivalent prints.
Wait! Village Voice. That's the rag I was trying to remember the name of. Allergy meds. They make me think like an Eschatot an hour after I have to take them.
Update 3: A. The Bible was written by people of varying inspiration, which I'll go into later because I'm drug addled enough to mock you but some things take more clarity. B. The Constitution and the founders are worshiped as divine writ, the ACLU as well as the Federalist Society, some members of the Supreme Court and a myriad of those in the scribbling class treat it as such. You got your knickers in a twist when I made fun of the current pop-kulcha idol among them, Hamilton. Or, rather, Lin Manuel Miranda's phony rapping, boogying, what is it like seven-hundred a ticket fictionalized version of the jerk and his slave-holding wife and sister-in-law. Geesh, put satin and a spot light on anything with a crappy book and score and it turns into a god for you guys.
Update 4: Hey, you don't have to take my word for that. Read this passage from Ishmael Reed's take on Hamilton. Note, especially that last line.
Establishment historians write best sellers in which some of the cruel actions of the Founding Fathers are smudged over if not ignored altogether. They’re guilty of a cover-up.
This is the case with Alexander Hamilton whose life has been scrubbed with a kind of historical Ajax until it sparkles. His reputation has been shored up as an abolitionist and someone who was opposed to slavery. Not true.
Alexander Hamilton married into the Schuylers, a slaveholding family, and participated in the bartering of slaves. One of “Hamilton’s” actors, Renee Elise Goldsberry (“The Color Purple”), who visited the Schuyler home, said the Schuyler sisters, “were the Kardashians” of 1780 — superstars, but with dignity and grace.” Maybe they were able to maintain “dignity and grace” because they had 27 slaves serve them. Black women whose labor assignments left them little time to preen. Is this actor disregarding, callously, that the sisters thrived on the labor of enslaved women? No, she probably attended the same schools that I attended. A curriculum that endowed slave traders and Indian exterminators with the status of deities.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
I'm Not Making This Up You Know
Oh, for Pete's sake. Do you think I would lie about something while telling you where to find it so you could check it? In my paraphrase I used a different multiplication fact but other than that it's exactly as I said it was.
Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better.
Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better.
Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
Arthur Stanley Eddington Science And The Unseen World: p. 56
Update: Poor Simps, he doesn't get that you can make more than one deduction from a general statement that our minds are a product of physical determinism. That the religious faith of materialist-atheists can be used to claim the impossibility of free choice, free thought, of the significance of religion as a hold over of material causation working through natural selection (a claim that was made in Darwin's inner circle almost immediately after it was published) that morality was a mere holdover of natural selection (Darwin, himself said so in The Descent of Man)* and that the same leads to the claim that, in fact, all of human thought has no more significance than mere appearance and delusion. As I pointed out this morning, that consequence of the materialist-atheist doctrine that our minds - as well as everything else - is a product of physical causation even impeaches the idea that causation is more than a product of random physical events in our minds and cannot have more truth value than religion or morality or anything else that can, baselessly and without any evidence, be attributed to material causation.
When your ideological system is monistic, that holds that it covers, literally, every single thing in the universe, including our minds and thoughts and the products of those thoughts, you'd better be careful about what that ideology is because, as in this case IT MIGHT JUST EAT UP ITS OWN INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION.
I didn't say that the idea that the mind is a product of material causation, that there is no transcendent quality in anything destroys the idea that morality is real, binding and durable, it's materialists going back centuries and millennia who said that. That atheists in the 21st century are ignorant of the literature of materialist-atheism doesn't shock me, they're a pretty ignorant lot. Simps is hardly a very smart example of the ideology, but the smart ones don't tend to be much more informed.
Frankly, I wonder if you could do the calculation if most atheists aren't people in the soft sciences and humanities who figure being an atheist is some kind of cheap and easy replacement for the math and science knowledge they were too lazy or uninterested in to get. It's sort of scientistic religion on the cheap for a lot of them.
* In fact before that because the Victorian intellectual Frances Cobb wrote a long essay about the dangerous consequences of that claim by Darwin, which he dismissed with breezy and sexist arrogance in The Descent of Man.
Update: Poor Simps, he doesn't get that you can make more than one deduction from a general statement that our minds are a product of physical determinism. That the religious faith of materialist-atheists can be used to claim the impossibility of free choice, free thought, of the significance of religion as a hold over of material causation working through natural selection (a claim that was made in Darwin's inner circle almost immediately after it was published) that morality was a mere holdover of natural selection (Darwin, himself said so in The Descent of Man)* and that the same leads to the claim that, in fact, all of human thought has no more significance than mere appearance and delusion. As I pointed out this morning, that consequence of the materialist-atheist doctrine that our minds - as well as everything else - is a product of physical causation even impeaches the idea that causation is more than a product of random physical events in our minds and cannot have more truth value than religion or morality or anything else that can, baselessly and without any evidence, be attributed to material causation.
When your ideological system is monistic, that holds that it covers, literally, every single thing in the universe, including our minds and thoughts and the products of those thoughts, you'd better be careful about what that ideology is because, as in this case IT MIGHT JUST EAT UP ITS OWN INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION.
I didn't say that the idea that the mind is a product of material causation, that there is no transcendent quality in anything destroys the idea that morality is real, binding and durable, it's materialists going back centuries and millennia who said that. That atheists in the 21st century are ignorant of the literature of materialist-atheism doesn't shock me, they're a pretty ignorant lot. Simps is hardly a very smart example of the ideology, but the smart ones don't tend to be much more informed.
Frankly, I wonder if you could do the calculation if most atheists aren't people in the soft sciences and humanities who figure being an atheist is some kind of cheap and easy replacement for the math and science knowledge they were too lazy or uninterested in to get. It's sort of scientistic religion on the cheap for a lot of them.
* In fact before that because the Victorian intellectual Frances Cobb wrote a long essay about the dangerous consequences of that claim by Darwin, which he dismissed with breezy and sexist arrogance in The Descent of Man.
Hey, You Guys Make Ultimate Claims About Reality You're Going To Have To Put Up With People Noticing Their Logical Results And Your Violating Those
To declare that free will is an illusion because our minds are entirely the determined product of physical causation in the brain has some rather profound consequences. Among those are the ones I noted yesterday. There is no "right or wrong" material state, there just is a state that matter is in. Under materialism there is an inevitable interaction between physical objects, between atoms, molecules, crystals, tissues arising out of physical causation and in the materialist model of the mind, made up out of their ideological holdings and not out of evidence, our ideas and thoughts. In the most extreme extensions of materialism, everything in the universe up to and including our ideologies are material, the product of inescapable material causation as governed by immutable physical laws.
As Eddington pointed out almost 90 years ago, under materialism there is no meaning to the idea that a boy who gives you the answer to 6 times 7 of 46 and the boy who gives you the answer of 42 have given you a "wrong" or "right" answer because both of their answers would be the inevitable result of the physical causation in their own brains as they were giving that answer. It would be no more right or wrong than the differences in crystal formation that you get depending on what chemicals were present as the crystal was forming and what was incorporated in the results. As he said, you shouldn't worry too much that materialism will dissolve religion because it can't even assert the rightness of the times table.
That is if materialists really believe in their monist faith that everything is a result of material causation. The results of that have been written about from before the Birth of Christ. As is typical of Indian thought, the Indian materialist school of Carvaka documented that inevitable logical conclusion of materialism, probably even before the Greeks, Romans, "enlightenment" materialists and the post-Darwinian German and other materialist philosophers who, over and over again, admitted that total amorality was an inevitable result of holding that the material universe, operating under physical law was all there is, ever was or will be.
The consequence of their own ideology, when taken to its logical conclusion is that nagging, scolding busy-body materialists should shut their traps and stop interfering with the operations of physical causation in the minds of other people whose brains don't lead them to believe in materialism or atheism or scientism. As I've pointed out before, under a really rigorous system of materialist thought, there is exactly the same truth value in Six-day Creationism as there is in Coyne's favorite interpretation of neo-Darwinism or Sean Carroll's favorite imaginary God-avoiding cosmos under cosmology or someone who spends their life frittering it away on computer games or comic books. All of them are the moral equivalent of iron oxidizing or an acid combining with a base. All of them are just the result of physical causation in different brains.
I, of course, don't buy that crap because I can see that materialism is about the most intellectually vacuous, vapid and logically incoherent ideological system ever devised. To the extent that materialists nag and scold people who don't believe or who they claim demonstrate non-adherence to their faith is the extent to which they display that they don't really believe in it, themselves. A logically consistent true believer in materialism would do what those Carvarkists advocated, pursue their own pleasure and not assert that their materialism had a transcendent attribute of truth or good which it can't have, under its own holdings.
Update: Reading this over for editing, as I recall the Carvakists also denied the reality of causation. Which is an interesting thing to think about. Everything we think about causation, really everything we think, would fall under the same umbrella of non-transcendence that envelops free will. How could the human concept of causation have any truth value, itself, how could it be anything other than a product of random actions of atoms, molecules, etc? How could we establish that there was anything other than a delusion of truth to it?
Update 2: Well, I only remember that from the course in Indian Philosophy I took as to fulfill a prerequisite in college but googling to look for the pertinent texts I found this:
Indian philosophers extensively discussed a number of issues relating to causation, including the nature of the causal relation, the definitions of cause and effect, and classifications of kinds of causes. Typically they stressed the importance of the material cause, rather than (as in Western philosophy) the efficient cause. In India only the Cārvāka materialists denied causation or took it to be subjective. This is unsurprising given that a concern with demonstrating the possibility of liberation motivated the theories of causation, for only the Cārvākas denied this possibility. The orthodox Hindu philosophers and the heterodox Buddhists and Jainas all accepted both the possibility of liberation and the reality of causation, though they differed sharply (and polemically) about the details.
It's interesting because it relates the denial of causation to the materialist agenda of denying that there was any transcendent soul or a need for us to follow a course of moral conduct to achieve salvation. The notion that the perception of causation is merely subjective goes exactly along with what I wondered in my first update. How, if our thoughts are merely the product of random combinations and interactions between atoms and molecules, could we possibly have any confidence that even the perception of causation is anything but a delusion, an epiphenomenon of that physical causation, a hold over of natural selection having possible survival and reproductive value but having no quality of truth that transcends that. If natural selection had produced the many illusions, such as religious belief, according to the current pudding-headed dogma of materialists, why shouldn't we believe that causation, itself, is not just another delusion? And with that, all of science is exposed as merely another delusion, as well. The infinitesimally small probability that any such delusion has some kind of relevance to any reality outside of living minds would be fun to quantify, though the result would probably be subjective. I doubt it would be nearly as probable as the effectively infinite improbabilities expressed in those stupendous exponents in the "fine-tuning" arguments.
As Eddington pointed out almost 90 years ago, under materialism there is no meaning to the idea that a boy who gives you the answer to 6 times 7 of 46 and the boy who gives you the answer of 42 have given you a "wrong" or "right" answer because both of their answers would be the inevitable result of the physical causation in their own brains as they were giving that answer. It would be no more right or wrong than the differences in crystal formation that you get depending on what chemicals were present as the crystal was forming and what was incorporated in the results. As he said, you shouldn't worry too much that materialism will dissolve religion because it can't even assert the rightness of the times table.
That is if materialists really believe in their monist faith that everything is a result of material causation. The results of that have been written about from before the Birth of Christ. As is typical of Indian thought, the Indian materialist school of Carvaka documented that inevitable logical conclusion of materialism, probably even before the Greeks, Romans, "enlightenment" materialists and the post-Darwinian German and other materialist philosophers who, over and over again, admitted that total amorality was an inevitable result of holding that the material universe, operating under physical law was all there is, ever was or will be.
The consequence of their own ideology, when taken to its logical conclusion is that nagging, scolding busy-body materialists should shut their traps and stop interfering with the operations of physical causation in the minds of other people whose brains don't lead them to believe in materialism or atheism or scientism. As I've pointed out before, under a really rigorous system of materialist thought, there is exactly the same truth value in Six-day Creationism as there is in Coyne's favorite interpretation of neo-Darwinism or Sean Carroll's favorite imaginary God-avoiding cosmos under cosmology or someone who spends their life frittering it away on computer games or comic books. All of them are the moral equivalent of iron oxidizing or an acid combining with a base. All of them are just the result of physical causation in different brains.
I, of course, don't buy that crap because I can see that materialism is about the most intellectually vacuous, vapid and logically incoherent ideological system ever devised. To the extent that materialists nag and scold people who don't believe or who they claim demonstrate non-adherence to their faith is the extent to which they display that they don't really believe in it, themselves. A logically consistent true believer in materialism would do what those Carvarkists advocated, pursue their own pleasure and not assert that their materialism had a transcendent attribute of truth or good which it can't have, under its own holdings.
Update: Reading this over for editing, as I recall the Carvakists also denied the reality of causation. Which is an interesting thing to think about. Everything we think about causation, really everything we think, would fall under the same umbrella of non-transcendence that envelops free will. How could the human concept of causation have any truth value, itself, how could it be anything other than a product of random actions of atoms, molecules, etc? How could we establish that there was anything other than a delusion of truth to it?
Update 2: Well, I only remember that from the course in Indian Philosophy I took as to fulfill a prerequisite in college but googling to look for the pertinent texts I found this:
Indian philosophers extensively discussed a number of issues relating to causation, including the nature of the causal relation, the definitions of cause and effect, and classifications of kinds of causes. Typically they stressed the importance of the material cause, rather than (as in Western philosophy) the efficient cause. In India only the Cārvāka materialists denied causation or took it to be subjective. This is unsurprising given that a concern with demonstrating the possibility of liberation motivated the theories of causation, for only the Cārvākas denied this possibility. The orthodox Hindu philosophers and the heterodox Buddhists and Jainas all accepted both the possibility of liberation and the reality of causation, though they differed sharply (and polemically) about the details.
It's interesting because it relates the denial of causation to the materialist agenda of denying that there was any transcendent soul or a need for us to follow a course of moral conduct to achieve salvation. The notion that the perception of causation is merely subjective goes exactly along with what I wondered in my first update. How, if our thoughts are merely the product of random combinations and interactions between atoms and molecules, could we possibly have any confidence that even the perception of causation is anything but a delusion, an epiphenomenon of that physical causation, a hold over of natural selection having possible survival and reproductive value but having no quality of truth that transcends that. If natural selection had produced the many illusions, such as religious belief, according to the current pudding-headed dogma of materialists, why shouldn't we believe that causation, itself, is not just another delusion? And with that, all of science is exposed as merely another delusion, as well. The infinitesimally small probability that any such delusion has some kind of relevance to any reality outside of living minds would be fun to quantify, though the result would probably be subjective. I doubt it would be nearly as probable as the effectively infinite improbabilities expressed in those stupendous exponents in the "fine-tuning" arguments.
Simps As Fashion Critic
That's really funny, for Simps to accuse someone else of not knowing how to dress. Have you ever seen him wearing his Groucho beret? I thought he'd finally become really demented and was wearing a cheap rug. He couldn't look more ridiculous wearing Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff's mortarboard on the street.
\
The rest of that exchange among Duncan's dolts is only mildly funny. But only in the sense that it's funny when silly, superficial and stupid people are pretentious. I like Chicago Dyke but she has gone down the road to Sillyville. She's drunk too much of Hemant's Koolaid.
Preemptive Update: I'm not making this up, you know.
Update For Real:
Hey, here's the perfect Simels look for the summer season.
\
Update: Oh, Jughead! No Simps, I'm pointing out how ridiculous you look trying to look like Groucho. He looked silly too, but he was Groucho. You ain't an never will be Groucho. I think the Jughead look is a natural one for you.
Imagine How He Behaves With Putin Who Is Even Richer Than This King
The Republican-fascist version of The Völkischer Beobachter, FOX,reportedly has been crowing that "unlike Obama" Trump didn't bow to the Saudi King. Well, as John Avarosis and others have pointed out, he curtsied to him. And, of course, they dug up a tweet of Trump criticizing Obama for allegedly bowing to him.
You've got to hand it to the Saudis, if there's one thing they know it's how to butter up despots so as to get what they want from them.
I should have noticed this yesterday but I can't not post it now that I've seen it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)