People who vote against their interest and for depravity do so, in most cases, on the basis of believing lies, of buying lies intentionally peddled to them.
Even many of the people who voted for Trump now realize they were swindled by a liar.
The foremost means of Trump selling his lies - not to mention the rest of the Republican-fascists - is through the American, commercial, corporate media. It is the lie seller, the lie teller, the lie peddler.
Among the decades of lies the American media have sold to the public is the demonization of Hillary Clinton. The ones told during the last campaign, including the ones about her e-mails are just the most recent in a quarter of a century of such lies.
The reason the media can lie about liberal politicians with impunity are a line of Supreme Court rulings beginning in the Sullivan decision of 1964 which made lies told about public figures next to impossible for, especially, politicians to sue for. The liberal justices, mostly, who supported the early line of rulings, most of them brought by media companies, publishers, etc. with a financial interest in the media argued and supported by liberal lawyers and such groups as the ACLU are responsible for freeing the media to lie with impunity. With the support of liberals who were duped into believing that was some kind of enhancement of democracy.
Keep in mind, that year, 1964, the timing of those court decisions purportedly enhancing freedom and the regress of American politics is not a mere coincidence of timing. Those rulings had real effects in real politics. Give or take a few back trackings due to things like Watergate, it is the general direction those rulings turned us in that got us where we are today.
The lies which such liberals enabled, those lies that the corporate media, the most effective engine of vote influencing in our country, unshockingly, unsurprisingly and predictably, and, overwhelmingly, attacked liberal politicians, individuals, groups and ideas. They attacked minority groups, they attacked women, extending and expanding on the previous practice of the media in the period from before those "liberal" rulings were made.
Those rulings were joined by other acts, such as those early in the Reagan administration which deregulated the media, getting rid of things like the Fairness Doctrine - originally put in place by, of all people, Herbert Hoover, so that broadcast, mass media could not be overwhelmingly one-sided in its presentation, disposed of by Ronald Reagan's thugs so it could be one sided - equal-time provisions, public service requirements, broadcast licensing to encourage diverse ownership, etc. WITH THE SUPPORT OF MANY ALLEGEDLY LIBERAL LEGAL GROUPS and the libertarian-liberals who had mostly didn't much really care about economic justice, and whose interests in civil rights for minorities who were discriminated against counts as a hobby, at best, a weak inclination, if that. Certainly not as compared to thing like having access to the porn many of those rulings in cases the media financed and brought, and in the liberties granted to the media so many of them make money out of.
While it is harder than watching an episode of Family Guy or The Dark Tower or whatever, it's not rocket science. The results of those rulings were entirely predictable from the start, the influence they would have on voting and, so, on our politics is as obvious as the rulings made against the campaign finance reforms which belatedly began to arise among liberals trying to get the horses back in the barn which the liberals such as those in the ACLU and the "liberal" New York Times had stampeded out of the corral.
These days, one of the biggest uses of the "free speech" lines is by neo-Nazis and white supremacists and people like Ann Coulter in line with their propaganda stunts. A use of it also made by corporate conservatives, giving up the unprofitable opposition to porn for the far more power-enhancing use of it as demonstrated by such figures as Antonin Scalia, William Rehnquist, and the other far-right Supreme Court members who have given us such abominations as Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo. That, alone, should tell real liberals how they were had by the Joel Goras, Nat Nentoffs, and much of the ACLU whose stands have combined to produce a Trump instead of a president like Lyndon Johnson, who, as I recently pointed out, signed Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act into law within a week, a week the like of which we have not had since then, largely thanks to the "free press" rulings that allowed them to lie Nixon into office in 1968, as they had not been able to do in 1960.
Those overturned campaign finance laws were largely in response to the combined power of the corporate media to lie on behalf of Republicans and conservative with the unfettered access to the financing of the rich. Oh, yes, and the ACLU has largely opposed any campaign finance laws as an inhibition of free speech, as well. Such is the way that such "First Amendement" advocacy works to give us a Trump and have given us, among other things, the return of white supremacist - nativists and, for the first time, actual Nazis to the White House.
I will take the Black and other liberal church ladies over the Ivy League libertarian liberals and media left for political astuteness, any given year.
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Saturday, June 10, 2017
More Than A Second Feature - Many Audio Plays From The Hear How Festival
Welcome to the 2017 HEAR Now PODCAST PALOOZA!
Gold Listening
The HEAR Now Festival is happy to present a variety of audio performances from around the U.S. and the world.
This page represents those artists whose works the judges admired, but were not heard this year at the Cinemark Theater on the Plaza.
The Festival's panel of judges agreed these works were also among the best submitted this year.
Be sure to click on the link for each program so you can learn more about our featured artists.
These programs will be available until August 1, 2017 for you to enjoy.
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I haven't listened to all of these but the ones I have are very good.
Second Feature - De Mortuis
If I'd been Charles Laughton I'd have done in the two idiots who walked in on him.
Again, I can't find a list of the cast or the author listed anywhere.
If you want to hear the kind of commercials that Bob and Ray satirized, there are several in this episode.
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Simon Ferry and Tim Spate - Lullaby Jock
An adaptation of Simon Ferry's hit solo stage show about his father Jock Ferry's experiences during and after the Second World War. It focuses on Jock's wartime experience as an infantryman and how it shaped his life when he returned home.
Cast: Simon Ferry, Tim Spite, Christopher Brougham, Russell Smith, Nikki MacDonnell, Alex Grieg and Brian Sergent, with Bruno Smith, Nina Smith, Gus Langbein and Sebastian Macaulay.
I think this is the first play from Radio New Zealand I've ever posted. It is heavy on audio effects, recreating battle scenes. You will definitely not want to listen to it through headphones, ear buds or with the volume turned all the way up. It's pretty intense in places.
Sick And Fed Up With The Stupid Snobs - Hate Mail
I am fucking sick and tired of people blaming Christianity which teaches the same line of Jewish radical economic egalitarianism that is exactly what the economic elite does and always has opposed. If our economics were ruled by the words of Jesus it would be the most radical redistribution of wealth ever imagined, it would make Marx look like he could get a job at the Wall Street Journal if not The Cato Institute.
The idea that the reason poor whites vote Republican is Christianity is stupid is BECAUSE BLACK WOMEN, A GROUP MORE DEEPLY AND HONESTLY OBSERVANT OF CHRISTIANITY VOTE OVERWHELMINGLY DEMOCRATIC. Those polls you love so much identify Black People as about the most religious group in the country, overwhelmingly they are Christians and they are the most reliable Democratic constituency there is.
Claiming that the hour a week poor whites might spend listening to a conservative preacher - and plenty of them never do - has THE determinative effect on their voting when you want to blame that while absolving the many more hours they spend listening to hate talk radio and movies and, most of all, TV every single day is stupid. If their preachers were so influential, why doesn't it effect their sex life so definitively? I haven't noticed news reports of a pandemic of marital fidelity among them. How come they don't follow other parts of the Gospel such as those mentioned in the first paragraph?
Your claim is so stupid that it speaks more to your real motives than it does the problem. TV feeds those resentments by focusing their feeling of being looked down on by those fabled coastal, liberal, college-educated elites, another thing that such liberals refuse to look at BECAUSE THAT KIND OF THING IS REAL AND OBVIOUS TO THE PEOPLE WHO SUCH PEOPLE INSULT AND MOCK. Not incidentally, it's also telling them to screw around and act in pretty much every way The Bible tells them not to and they very conspicuously follow the gospel of TV and Hollywood a lot better than they do the Gospel of Jesus.
I'm especially fucking sick and tired of the same people who have enabled the media to do that for decades, as they whine about things like religion while ignoring the pervasive influence of the corporate media because "The First Amendment" believe themselves to be the acme of intelligence when those decades in the political wilderness and the obvious reasons for it have not taught them one single thing except to keep on with what got us pushed into that wilderness in the 1960s and beyond. The same things that did that are still part of the agenda of such whiny lefties who never learn even as they tell each other how smart they are.
The idea that the reason poor whites vote Republican is Christianity is stupid is BECAUSE BLACK WOMEN, A GROUP MORE DEEPLY AND HONESTLY OBSERVANT OF CHRISTIANITY VOTE OVERWHELMINGLY DEMOCRATIC. Those polls you love so much identify Black People as about the most religious group in the country, overwhelmingly they are Christians and they are the most reliable Democratic constituency there is.
Claiming that the hour a week poor whites might spend listening to a conservative preacher - and plenty of them never do - has THE determinative effect on their voting when you want to blame that while absolving the many more hours they spend listening to hate talk radio and movies and, most of all, TV every single day is stupid. If their preachers were so influential, why doesn't it effect their sex life so definitively? I haven't noticed news reports of a pandemic of marital fidelity among them. How come they don't follow other parts of the Gospel such as those mentioned in the first paragraph?
Your claim is so stupid that it speaks more to your real motives than it does the problem. TV feeds those resentments by focusing their feeling of being looked down on by those fabled coastal, liberal, college-educated elites, another thing that such liberals refuse to look at BECAUSE THAT KIND OF THING IS REAL AND OBVIOUS TO THE PEOPLE WHO SUCH PEOPLE INSULT AND MOCK. Not incidentally, it's also telling them to screw around and act in pretty much every way The Bible tells them not to and they very conspicuously follow the gospel of TV and Hollywood a lot better than they do the Gospel of Jesus.
I'm especially fucking sick and tired of the same people who have enabled the media to do that for decades, as they whine about things like religion while ignoring the pervasive influence of the corporate media because "The First Amendment" believe themselves to be the acme of intelligence when those decades in the political wilderness and the obvious reasons for it have not taught them one single thing except to keep on with what got us pushed into that wilderness in the 1960s and beyond. The same things that did that are still part of the agenda of such whiny lefties who never learn even as they tell each other how smart they are.
No, Katha, Liberal Elities Are The Problem, The Liberal Elites Who Enabled The Media That Created Trump
Katha Pollitt has an article up which is worth thinking about, complaining about the growing venue of media dedicated to brow-beating college educated, liberals from the two coasts over them alienating blue collar voters from the South and Mid-West. I agree entirely with that much of Pollitt's complaint, that stuff is annoying, demanding that we sympathize and try to understand the poor-whites who feel looked down on by the coastal elites and that we drop things like civil rights, women's rights to the ownership of their bodies and lives, LGBT rights, the science around global warming.... you name it those tireless media tutters and tiskers will tell us we've got to give it up to attract their stereotypical white, blue collar voter - an insulting stereotype in itself.
Pollitt asks why none of them nag the Trump voters to try to understand us and what we think, especially as such people as are always the focus of this discussion, poor-white, blue collar people without advanced educational credentials and, often, without jobs and too often when they have them don't earn a living wage ... THOSE ARE SOME OF THE VERY PEOPLE WE EXIST TO BENEFIT.
That is, of course, a great point. And that it is a legitimate point is a dead giveaway of what the real motives of the media naggers of Northern, coastal liberals are, they are a demand by well placed columnists and others that we give up what makes liberalism, liberalism for a neo-liberal, conservative program. That program which the media has been selling to such people, the working poor, the underclass, 24-7-365 x decades with the slickest sales techniques that the social sciences can dream up for them. .
The reason that the white underclass votes against their interest is that they have been successfully propagandized by the free press, especially television and hate-talk radio and in movies out of the allegedly liberal Hollywood and, increasingly, on the internet. And the reason that broadcast media has gotten away with doing that is that free-press, free-speech liberals have not only allowed them to lie with total impunity, THEY HAVE FAVORED THE VERY COURT RULINGS AND GOVERNMENT POLICIES THAT HAVE ALLOWED FOX AND CNN AND ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, AND, YES, EVEN THE PART-TIME LIBERAL MSNBC TO LIE US INTO TRUMP.
I have gone over this before, liberal media figures, people like Norman Lear, have also presented condescending views of the white working class, figures like Archie Bunker and so many others - many Southern and Mid-Western, most often rural identities as figures of ridicule only occasionally injected with a generally soppy, sentimental and all too temporary view of their humanity which doesn't fool the people who are alienated by that condescension.
You want to know why people voted for Trump or Ronald Reagan, for that matter, look at the media who created them, the media, that all-powerful source which is the foremost venue of attitude transmission in the United States.
That media is not in the hands of real liberals but it does what it does because real liberals were suckered into ignoring the power of the media to lie on behalf of the billionaire-millionaire class and that it was entirely enthusiastic about using every scheme that the clever men and women hired to manipulate information for the highest bidder.
The American media, under the First Amendment as interpreted, BY LIBERALS, since 1964 has been 100% dedicated to manipulating people into first tuning in, second to think in ways that would benefit the wealthy using whatever tools of class and regional antagonism and resentment they could find and applying those to really rigging the vote. Putin, with plenty of his own clever men and women to study our system merely did the same things to his own ends. And, now that we know how seriously treasonous the Trump machine was in colluding with a foreign despot, the media is covering up for them as fast as it is exposing their treason. Lying their heads off to do so, lying to the very people who they sold Trump to, in the beginning.
Katha Pollitt, as a professional writer, probably has entirely too much of a personal and financial interest against taking a really hard, really honest, look at how Trump really was elected in the United States, into how we could have gone, within a lifetime, from a country where such a person in the presidency was unthinkable to one who is there and who will be kept there by the de facto fascist Republican Party as they destroy the things that stand between them and absolute power. I have never, yet read and certainly not heard anyone in the media take a really hard look at how things really did start turning with the 1964 Sullivan Decision and the rest of the lauded First Amendment decisions that let us read dirty books and let the media lie us into the New York Real-Estate Tycoon Satyricon we are living through.
Pollitt asks why none of them nag the Trump voters to try to understand us and what we think, especially as such people as are always the focus of this discussion, poor-white, blue collar people without advanced educational credentials and, often, without jobs and too often when they have them don't earn a living wage ... THOSE ARE SOME OF THE VERY PEOPLE WE EXIST TO BENEFIT.
That is, of course, a great point. And that it is a legitimate point is a dead giveaway of what the real motives of the media naggers of Northern, coastal liberals are, they are a demand by well placed columnists and others that we give up what makes liberalism, liberalism for a neo-liberal, conservative program. That program which the media has been selling to such people, the working poor, the underclass, 24-7-365 x decades with the slickest sales techniques that the social sciences can dream up for them. .
The reason that the white underclass votes against their interest is that they have been successfully propagandized by the free press, especially television and hate-talk radio and in movies out of the allegedly liberal Hollywood and, increasingly, on the internet. And the reason that broadcast media has gotten away with doing that is that free-press, free-speech liberals have not only allowed them to lie with total impunity, THEY HAVE FAVORED THE VERY COURT RULINGS AND GOVERNMENT POLICIES THAT HAVE ALLOWED FOX AND CNN AND ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, AND, YES, EVEN THE PART-TIME LIBERAL MSNBC TO LIE US INTO TRUMP.
I have gone over this before, liberal media figures, people like Norman Lear, have also presented condescending views of the white working class, figures like Archie Bunker and so many others - many Southern and Mid-Western, most often rural identities as figures of ridicule only occasionally injected with a generally soppy, sentimental and all too temporary view of their humanity which doesn't fool the people who are alienated by that condescension.
You want to know why people voted for Trump or Ronald Reagan, for that matter, look at the media who created them, the media, that all-powerful source which is the foremost venue of attitude transmission in the United States.
That media is not in the hands of real liberals but it does what it does because real liberals were suckered into ignoring the power of the media to lie on behalf of the billionaire-millionaire class and that it was entirely enthusiastic about using every scheme that the clever men and women hired to manipulate information for the highest bidder.
The American media, under the First Amendment as interpreted, BY LIBERALS, since 1964 has been 100% dedicated to manipulating people into first tuning in, second to think in ways that would benefit the wealthy using whatever tools of class and regional antagonism and resentment they could find and applying those to really rigging the vote. Putin, with plenty of his own clever men and women to study our system merely did the same things to his own ends. And, now that we know how seriously treasonous the Trump machine was in colluding with a foreign despot, the media is covering up for them as fast as it is exposing their treason. Lying their heads off to do so, lying to the very people who they sold Trump to, in the beginning.
Katha Pollitt, as a professional writer, probably has entirely too much of a personal and financial interest against taking a really hard, really honest, look at how Trump really was elected in the United States, into how we could have gone, within a lifetime, from a country where such a person in the presidency was unthinkable to one who is there and who will be kept there by the de facto fascist Republican Party as they destroy the things that stand between them and absolute power. I have never, yet read and certainly not heard anyone in the media take a really hard look at how things really did start turning with the 1964 Sullivan Decision and the rest of the lauded First Amendment decisions that let us read dirty books and let the media lie us into the New York Real-Estate Tycoon Satyricon we are living through.
Friday, June 9, 2017
Arthur Berger - Chamber Music For 13 Players
I. Variations
II. Allegro Moderato, Leggiero
Gunther Schuler, conductor
Original Liner Notes
There was almost always a quality of charm in Arthur Berger's music, this piece has more of it than most pieces of the time it was written. I seem to recall reading Berger say it was a piece in which his free use of 12 tone procedures were inspired by the Italian composers like Dallipiccola and Nono. The sound they achieved even more so than formal considerations. But I don't have the time to go look for that quote just now.
I really miss Arthur Berger
II. Allegro Moderato, Leggiero
Gunther Schuler, conductor
Original Liner Notes
There was almost always a quality of charm in Arthur Berger's music, this piece has more of it than most pieces of the time it was written. I seem to recall reading Berger say it was a piece in which his free use of 12 tone procedures were inspired by the Italian composers like Dallipiccola and Nono. The sound they achieved even more so than formal considerations. But I don't have the time to go look for that quote just now.
I really miss Arthur Berger
Charlie Hebdo Est Toujours Puant
Longtime readers will remember that I got some heat when, as they were attacked for provoking the anger of Muslims, I pointed out that the people who ran the French non-humor magazine Charlie Hebdo were a bunch of flaming racist assholes who had knowingly and irresponsibly inflamed the rage which motivated the attacks on them?
Well, in their coverage of the British election and other news British, they put a picture of Theresa May on their cover, decapitated, holding her hand saying that British multiculturalism has been decapitated. That's nasty but mild and, as May is a pretty awful politician who is about to form a pretty awful minority government with a bigoted, ultra-right, crypto-fascist party which will demand some terrible things to keep her stinking Tories in office, perhaps within bounds. Especially when compared to their clever commentary on the recent London terror attack:
Well, in their coverage of the British election and other news British, they put a picture of Theresa May on their cover, decapitated, holding her hand saying that British multiculturalism has been decapitated. That's nasty but mild and, as May is a pretty awful politician who is about to form a pretty awful minority government with a bigoted, ultra-right, crypto-fascist party which will demand some terrible things to keep her stinking Tories in office, perhaps within bounds. Especially when compared to their clever commentary on the recent London terror attack:
It says: The slimming advice from the Islamic State, Run fast!
Charlie Hebdo is run by a bunch of the biggest assholes in any excuse for journalism in the world. The people who work for it stink as much as the ones who work for FOX or Breitbart or any other brain toilet venue of media.
Something Good To Say About The Media
I don't often get to hear clips of her show but I think Joy-Ann Reid is one of the best news hosts in the media, today. She's so much smarter than most you have to fear for her future on cable TV. I promise to try to put on more of her.
I Absolutely Loathe Alan Dershowitz
Vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie !
Napoleon on the French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
I thought you should read it in the original French, for once.
As far as I'm concerned, Alan Dershowitz is a retired Harvard Law prof. celebrity ambulance chaser, get-offer of celebrity murderers and likely murderers, torture advocate, pseudo-liberal advocate of pretty much anything that enhances the ability of the rich and super rich to dominate and swamp democracy - and those are some of his more attractive attributes - is as good an example of what Napoleon said as anyone alive today in the United States. That he is getting himself all over the right-wing media by claiming that Donald Trump not only wasn't guilty of but, apparently, can't be guilty of obstruction of justice because he can fire people in the Department of Justice AND THAT HE CAN PARDON THE GUILTY doesn't surprise me.
Alan Dershowitz, so far as I'm concerned, is about as credible as that other media-figure-lawyer Geraldo Rivera. He is crud.
Napoleon on the French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
I thought you should read it in the original French, for once.
As far as I'm concerned, Alan Dershowitz is a retired Harvard Law prof. celebrity ambulance chaser, get-offer of celebrity murderers and likely murderers, torture advocate, pseudo-liberal advocate of pretty much anything that enhances the ability of the rich and super rich to dominate and swamp democracy - and those are some of his more attractive attributes - is as good an example of what Napoleon said as anyone alive today in the United States. That he is getting himself all over the right-wing media by claiming that Donald Trump not only wasn't guilty of but, apparently, can't be guilty of obstruction of justice because he can fire people in the Department of Justice AND THAT HE CAN PARDON THE GUILTY doesn't surprise me.
Alan Dershowitz, so far as I'm concerned, is about as credible as that other media-figure-lawyer Geraldo Rivera. He is crud.
Why The Serious People And Media Are Such Douchebag Clowns And Why The Comedians Are Credible
Listening to the excellent comedy commentary of Seth Meyers
Hearing the Republicans, Senator James Risch and Paul Ryan and Chris Christie and Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz, journalists talking about Trump's lies I suddenly realized that the reason the comedy show hosts and their writers, the best of them, the Samantha Bees, the Stephen Colberts, the Seth Meyers, are more serious than the "serious" people is because they cut through the lawyerly double-speak, the language that carries more plausible deniability lies than honest content which pervades the "serious" media and weighty public life and our political institutions.
Listen to the videos of the hearings and compare the way that liars like Susan Collins and many of her Republican colleagues asked questions to produce such bald faced lies to be repeated on FOX and by Republican mouthpieces and pundits on the other networks and compare those to the comedy that is based in cutting through their crap.
I think this is the kind of stuff that comes from too many lawyers trained in this kind of straining of credulity and how to use that to make a career in helping crooks and gangsters get crooked judges to do crooked stuff controlling our public lives. If it starts in the elite law schools is certainly worth thinking about, it's breathtaking how many of the people who do it come from those places. I think that kind of stuff has corrupted our country to an incredible degree. I think its origins lie in the past in things like the Dred Scott decision - turning people into commodities to be used by slave owners by denying their personhood - and the Supreme Court clerk who inserted the corporate personhood crap into a ruling - from where it has been used to destroy democracy as recently as the Citizens United decision. If that hadn't been done, while it would have been possible for our Constitutional system to produce some really bad presidents, it would almost certainly not have been able to produce a Trump.
While the comedians can call the crooks, gangsters and monumental liars on their nonsense, they don't have the power to prevent them from going right on doing their stuff and getting away with it, depending on the mutual dishonesty of their colleagues in government, on the courts and in the media to cover for them. It's almost shocking that they are allowed to get away with pointing out what a bunch of fucking liars and gangsters those folks are. Fortunately, people watch them and they make money for someone. Maybe even some of those people don't especially like the respectable, elite, rich gangsters and thugs either.
Update: I should have mentioned that if you wanted a great example you could compare Meyers and Bee and Colbert to NPR's Morning Edition this morning. Anyone who thinks Morning Edition and its staff weren't carrying water for the lying Trump and his Republican-pundit liars is lying to themselves. And that's not even to mention Maine Public Broadcasting's Morning Edition staff who were giving Susan Collins the royal treatment. They're disgusting.
Hearing the Republicans, Senator James Risch and Paul Ryan and Chris Christie and Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz, journalists talking about Trump's lies I suddenly realized that the reason the comedy show hosts and their writers, the best of them, the Samantha Bees, the Stephen Colberts, the Seth Meyers, are more serious than the "serious" people is because they cut through the lawyerly double-speak, the language that carries more plausible deniability lies than honest content which pervades the "serious" media and weighty public life and our political institutions.
Listen to the videos of the hearings and compare the way that liars like Susan Collins and many of her Republican colleagues asked questions to produce such bald faced lies to be repeated on FOX and by Republican mouthpieces and pundits on the other networks and compare those to the comedy that is based in cutting through their crap.
I think this is the kind of stuff that comes from too many lawyers trained in this kind of straining of credulity and how to use that to make a career in helping crooks and gangsters get crooked judges to do crooked stuff controlling our public lives. If it starts in the elite law schools is certainly worth thinking about, it's breathtaking how many of the people who do it come from those places. I think that kind of stuff has corrupted our country to an incredible degree. I think its origins lie in the past in things like the Dred Scott decision - turning people into commodities to be used by slave owners by denying their personhood - and the Supreme Court clerk who inserted the corporate personhood crap into a ruling - from where it has been used to destroy democracy as recently as the Citizens United decision. If that hadn't been done, while it would have been possible for our Constitutional system to produce some really bad presidents, it would almost certainly not have been able to produce a Trump.
While the comedians can call the crooks, gangsters and monumental liars on their nonsense, they don't have the power to prevent them from going right on doing their stuff and getting away with it, depending on the mutual dishonesty of their colleagues in government, on the courts and in the media to cover for them. It's almost shocking that they are allowed to get away with pointing out what a bunch of fucking liars and gangsters those folks are. Fortunately, people watch them and they make money for someone. Maybe even some of those people don't especially like the respectable, elite, rich gangsters and thugs either.
Update: I should have mentioned that if you wanted a great example you could compare Meyers and Bee and Colbert to NPR's Morning Edition this morning. Anyone who thinks Morning Edition and its staff weren't carrying water for the lying Trump and his Republican-pundit liars is lying to themselves. And that's not even to mention Maine Public Broadcasting's Morning Edition staff who were giving Susan Collins the royal treatment. They're disgusting.
The Universe Creators Objecting To Far More Modest Claims
This part of my argument from yesterday was objected to, though I don't think the person who did so really understood what they were attacking. The claim I made is contained in this sentence.
Even taking as a given those constants are accurately measured, are real as defined and have the enormous range of merely physical consequences asserted as made for them, many people with degrees and careers in science believe in them on a faith surpassing the faith that one would have to accept the one for the existence of God based on them.
I think that's a rather obvious statement. In fact, it touches on the real way that science really does work in the world of science. Unless someone who works in science has gone through every scientific demonstration of a point, if they accept the conclusion reached, they buy the idea on the faith that that point has been proved to be reliably believed, uninspected. They buy it in the way that people buy things made by old, established name-brand companies whose reliability is assumed.
That is most easily understood by considering the mathematics that science is based in. Scientists use mathematics every day, it has been called "the language of science" though I don't think that's a particularly good analogy, let's take that on faith. But the majority of scientists, I'd guess practically all working scientists, haven't gone through the proofs of every axiom or theorem or other logical and mathematical proof of every bit of math they have used. When they use it they take it on faith that those proofs are sound, they don't know that in more than a banal manner.
That is especially true when they take something true in the physical or biological sciences when they rely on the peer reviewers of papers, articles and books, on the competence, honesty and diligence of their colleagues - which, as you can read in such places as Retraction Watch,* are anywhere from occasionally unreliable to quite shockingly unreliable. Entire sciences have been shown to be scandalously unreliable in all of the above, yet they aren't booted out of the pantheon of scientists and their areas of research demoted to lore or pseudo-science. And sometimes, as can be seen in the quality of the work and claims of those in accepted, academic psychology as opposed to the entirely more rigorous research into parapsychology, that acceptance verses non-acceptance is not based on the honesty, rigor and diligence of the researchers but out of ideological motives. I know that last point is controversial but, having read a lot of the research, I think it would be dishonest to not admit that to be true.
In the case of my argument yesterday, it is a matter of the complex nature of the arguments needed to accept scientific premises, such as the value of the constants of nature and the fine tuning of their measurement and the combined probabilities for those constants falling within exquisitely narrow limits to have produced not only the life permitting universe we experience and which science can study (in no small part to us being here to do and read science) as I recall the incredibly narrow probability of ten to the power of sixty in the first but the overall conclusion that the combined factors in the consideration make the overall probability of a life permitting universe to be ten to the power of ten to the power of ten to the power of twenty-three. I certainly don't understand the scientific and mathematical arguments leading to the valuation or even identification of all of those constants I would guess that the larger number of scientists who deal with such matters take some or even most of those on the kind of faith I mentioned above.
My claim is that given all of those complex arguments and the science they are based in is accurate and true and the insights claimed about them are valid, the use of those in arguments about the likelihood of that incredibly small range of probabilities permitting life and intelligent life, in face of the stupendously greater probability of of life prohibiting universes leading to conclusions that it is by design is a relatively simple and straight-forward argument. If materialists and atheists want to claim the constants of the universe are valid and the consequent arguments of the probabilities of a life sustaining, intelligent life producing universe are valid, then they have no right to prohibit the extra-scientific use of them to argue for the conclusion that our universe is the way it is by the design of God.
Especially as almost every materialist or atheist who accepts the validity of those for secular, banally material matters does so on a faith that doesn't really exceed the faith of those who conclude that they exhibit the design by an intelligent creator. And many of them ask us to believe in far more incredible powers of creation.
The materialist-atheist alternatives trying to get rid of that conclusion, even some of them entirely absurd assertions such as Hugh Everett's Many Worlds interpretation requiring that on the basis of probability math, one believe that the most tiny and banal occurrences in our experience generate an infinite number of alternative universes and who knows how many variations of his fantastic idea, require a belief that we are all unintelligent, unaware, unintentional creator gods of far more than the one universe claimed to have been created by God in Genesis and other creation lore of religion. The number of universes which atheists anxiously create in a frantic attempt to explain away the conclusions that people draw from the fine-tuning of our one, observable universe far exceed the number of religious creation myths. Given time, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of interpretations of quantum physics didn't come up with more framings of their alternative than have been produced by the major religious traditions. They have made a good start on that in the last 61 years, when Everett published his paper that set the business of universe creation off. The results of that kind of stuff have led many observers such as Peter Woit and others - hardly friendly to religion- to bemoan the state of decadence theoretical physics and cosmology have entered into. As I've pointed out before, it was a state of gloom that led Bertrand Russell, the atheist pope of his day, to gloomily announce an imminent period of scientific and intellectual decadence in the late 1920s, on encountering the conclusions that physicists already had reached by that time.
If they can argue the absurdities that the multiverse conjecture depends on to support atheism - where the energy that powers their continually created universes from things like me scratching my nose comes from is the one that struck me first - they can not reasonably be allowed to dismiss, out of hand, the far less fantastic and self-contradicting claims of those who, through far more established science, conclude that belief in design is reasonable. Especially among those who do not claim that their conclusion can be used to do science. The claims and assertions of many who believe in design are far more moderate in their claims.
* Their first page this morning contains these headlines;
“Data had been manipulated:” Science Translational Medicine retracts paper
“Authors’ negligence” causes “a plethora of data errors”
A retraction gets retracted — but the first author’s contract is still terminated
Their motto is, "Retraction Watch Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process".
Even taking as a given those constants are accurately measured, are real as defined and have the enormous range of merely physical consequences asserted as made for them, many people with degrees and careers in science believe in them on a faith surpassing the faith that one would have to accept the one for the existence of God based on them.
That is most easily understood by considering the mathematics that science is based in. Scientists use mathematics every day, it has been called "the language of science" though I don't think that's a particularly good analogy, let's take that on faith. But the majority of scientists, I'd guess practically all working scientists, haven't gone through the proofs of every axiom or theorem or other logical and mathematical proof of every bit of math they have used. When they use it they take it on faith that those proofs are sound, they don't know that in more than a banal manner.
That is especially true when they take something true in the physical or biological sciences when they rely on the peer reviewers of papers, articles and books, on the competence, honesty and diligence of their colleagues - which, as you can read in such places as Retraction Watch,* are anywhere from occasionally unreliable to quite shockingly unreliable. Entire sciences have been shown to be scandalously unreliable in all of the above, yet they aren't booted out of the pantheon of scientists and their areas of research demoted to lore or pseudo-science. And sometimes, as can be seen in the quality of the work and claims of those in accepted, academic psychology as opposed to the entirely more rigorous research into parapsychology, that acceptance verses non-acceptance is not based on the honesty, rigor and diligence of the researchers but out of ideological motives. I know that last point is controversial but, having read a lot of the research, I think it would be dishonest to not admit that to be true.
In the case of my argument yesterday, it is a matter of the complex nature of the arguments needed to accept scientific premises, such as the value of the constants of nature and the fine tuning of their measurement and the combined probabilities for those constants falling within exquisitely narrow limits to have produced not only the life permitting universe we experience and which science can study (in no small part to us being here to do and read science) as I recall the incredibly narrow probability of ten to the power of sixty in the first but the overall conclusion that the combined factors in the consideration make the overall probability of a life permitting universe to be ten to the power of ten to the power of ten to the power of twenty-three. I certainly don't understand the scientific and mathematical arguments leading to the valuation or even identification of all of those constants I would guess that the larger number of scientists who deal with such matters take some or even most of those on the kind of faith I mentioned above.
My claim is that given all of those complex arguments and the science they are based in is accurate and true and the insights claimed about them are valid, the use of those in arguments about the likelihood of that incredibly small range of probabilities permitting life and intelligent life, in face of the stupendously greater probability of of life prohibiting universes leading to conclusions that it is by design is a relatively simple and straight-forward argument. If materialists and atheists want to claim the constants of the universe are valid and the consequent arguments of the probabilities of a life sustaining, intelligent life producing universe are valid, then they have no right to prohibit the extra-scientific use of them to argue for the conclusion that our universe is the way it is by the design of God.
Especially as almost every materialist or atheist who accepts the validity of those for secular, banally material matters does so on a faith that doesn't really exceed the faith of those who conclude that they exhibit the design by an intelligent creator. And many of them ask us to believe in far more incredible powers of creation.
The materialist-atheist alternatives trying to get rid of that conclusion, even some of them entirely absurd assertions such as Hugh Everett's Many Worlds interpretation requiring that on the basis of probability math, one believe that the most tiny and banal occurrences in our experience generate an infinite number of alternative universes and who knows how many variations of his fantastic idea, require a belief that we are all unintelligent, unaware, unintentional creator gods of far more than the one universe claimed to have been created by God in Genesis and other creation lore of religion. The number of universes which atheists anxiously create in a frantic attempt to explain away the conclusions that people draw from the fine-tuning of our one, observable universe far exceed the number of religious creation myths. Given time, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of interpretations of quantum physics didn't come up with more framings of their alternative than have been produced by the major religious traditions. They have made a good start on that in the last 61 years, when Everett published his paper that set the business of universe creation off. The results of that kind of stuff have led many observers such as Peter Woit and others - hardly friendly to religion- to bemoan the state of decadence theoretical physics and cosmology have entered into. As I've pointed out before, it was a state of gloom that led Bertrand Russell, the atheist pope of his day, to gloomily announce an imminent period of scientific and intellectual decadence in the late 1920s, on encountering the conclusions that physicists already had reached by that time.
If they can argue the absurdities that the multiverse conjecture depends on to support atheism - where the energy that powers their continually created universes from things like me scratching my nose comes from is the one that struck me first - they can not reasonably be allowed to dismiss, out of hand, the far less fantastic and self-contradicting claims of those who, through far more established science, conclude that belief in design is reasonable. Especially among those who do not claim that their conclusion can be used to do science. The claims and assertions of many who believe in design are far more moderate in their claims.
* Their first page this morning contains these headlines;
“Data had been manipulated:” Science Translational Medicine retracts paper
“Authors’ negligence” causes “a plethora of data errors”
A retraction gets retracted — but the first author’s contract is still terminated
Anesthesiology society bans co-author of researcher with record-number of retractions
Their motto is, "Retraction Watch Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process".
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Marc Kasowitz Goes To Washington
I don't know much about Marc Kasowitz except that he's been one of Trumps thuggish lawyers. I had read someone describe him as a "mafia divorce lawyer" but I don't know anything about that. He looks the part, that much I do know.
Now that I've seen and heard him today, spinning Comey's testimony and now that I'm reading people who know more than I do pointing out how stupid what he's saying is, I have a feeling he's going to be more like Baghdad Bob than the kind of presidential lawyer we've become used to seeing.
But Kasowitz made a significant error in describing the sequence of events prior to the memo’s disclosure. He claims the public record “reveals that The New York Times was quoting from these memos the day before the referenced tweet, which belies Mr. Comey’s excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information and appears to be entirely retaliatory.” In fact, Trump posted his tweet about “tapes” of their conversations on May 12. The first Times article about the memos wasn’t published until four days later on May 16. While the Times did publish an article on May 11 describing the January 27 dinner in which Trump purportedly asked Comey for his loyalty, the Times cited officials who recalled Comey’s descriptions of the evening to them, not the memos themselves.
Kasowitz also described Comey’s drafted recollections as “privileged communications, one of which was classified.” Comey never described the memos as classified in his written testimony or in his answers to senators’ questions on Thursday. At one point in his written statement, he explicitly said he “immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn.” He also did not correct senators who referred to the memos as unclassified multiple times throughout the hearing, despite taking pains to avoid discussing potentially classified matters at other times.
It’s not clear why Kasowitz referred to the memos as “privileged communications.” Because Comey was not Trump’s lawyer, priest, or spouse, his conversations with the president would not be covered by the typical legal privileges. From the available context, it’s possible Kasowitz meant to refer to the memos as falling under executive privilege, which shields some communications between presidents and their subordinates from judicial and legislative scrutiny. But the White House explicitly said Monday it would not invoke that privilege to block any of Comey’s testimony. Even if the memos did fall under its scope—and it’s unclear if they would—his discussion of them on Thursday would therefore not be illicit. Executive privilege does not apply to disclosing documents to the public or the press.
And, of course the invaluable Charles Pierce has his take on it.
This is really not the way to go here, lad. You see, this argument implies that Comey's memos are accurate, which is Not Good for your fractious client. (And, hey, how about that Preet Bharara, the defenestrated US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and conspicuous antagonist of the current president*, sitting right there behind James Comey like Banquo's ghost? That was cool.) Nevertheless, Kasowitz kept digging.
You can read the excerpts from what Kasowitz said at Pierce's blog. He ended his post on this thus.
Flat denials also are not the way to do it, not with Comey's memory and gift for crafting the critical memo. Remember when defending the president was any Beltway lawyer's golden ticket? Yeah, those were the days. If Kasowitz stays with his current gig, I expect to see him in a commercial on my TV late at night, asking if I have had an accident on the job or a problem with an arterial stent. Operators are standing by.
In that case, one expects he'll be shilling on FOX along with the catheter commercials and gold swindle comeons.
Now that I've seen and heard him today, spinning Comey's testimony and now that I'm reading people who know more than I do pointing out how stupid what he's saying is, I have a feeling he's going to be more like Baghdad Bob than the kind of presidential lawyer we've become used to seeing.
But Kasowitz made a significant error in describing the sequence of events prior to the memo’s disclosure. He claims the public record “reveals that The New York Times was quoting from these memos the day before the referenced tweet, which belies Mr. Comey’s excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information and appears to be entirely retaliatory.” In fact, Trump posted his tweet about “tapes” of their conversations on May 12. The first Times article about the memos wasn’t published until four days later on May 16. While the Times did publish an article on May 11 describing the January 27 dinner in which Trump purportedly asked Comey for his loyalty, the Times cited officials who recalled Comey’s descriptions of the evening to them, not the memos themselves.
Kasowitz also described Comey’s drafted recollections as “privileged communications, one of which was classified.” Comey never described the memos as classified in his written testimony or in his answers to senators’ questions on Thursday. At one point in his written statement, he explicitly said he “immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn.” He also did not correct senators who referred to the memos as unclassified multiple times throughout the hearing, despite taking pains to avoid discussing potentially classified matters at other times.
It’s not clear why Kasowitz referred to the memos as “privileged communications.” Because Comey was not Trump’s lawyer, priest, or spouse, his conversations with the president would not be covered by the typical legal privileges. From the available context, it’s possible Kasowitz meant to refer to the memos as falling under executive privilege, which shields some communications between presidents and their subordinates from judicial and legislative scrutiny. But the White House explicitly said Monday it would not invoke that privilege to block any of Comey’s testimony. Even if the memos did fall under its scope—and it’s unclear if they would—his discussion of them on Thursday would therefore not be illicit. Executive privilege does not apply to disclosing documents to the public or the press.
And, of course the invaluable Charles Pierce has his take on it.
This is really not the way to go here, lad. You see, this argument implies that Comey's memos are accurate, which is Not Good for your fractious client. (And, hey, how about that Preet Bharara, the defenestrated US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and conspicuous antagonist of the current president*, sitting right there behind James Comey like Banquo's ghost? That was cool.) Nevertheless, Kasowitz kept digging.
You can read the excerpts from what Kasowitz said at Pierce's blog. He ended his post on this thus.
Flat denials also are not the way to do it, not with Comey's memory and gift for crafting the critical memo. Remember when defending the president was any Beltway lawyer's golden ticket? Yeah, those were the days. If Kasowitz stays with his current gig, I expect to see him in a commercial on my TV late at night, asking if I have had an accident on the job or a problem with an arterial stent. Operators are standing by.
In that case, one expects he'll be shilling on FOX along with the catheter commercials and gold swindle comeons.
Now that James Comey has testified that he told Rod Rosenstein about his concerns about Trump's conduct, after Rosenstein was sworn in and not long before Rosenstein wrote the letter Trump used as his excuse to fire Comey, the Department of Justice ethics office must open a serious investigation of Rosenstein because everything about his behavior as Deputy Attorney General has stunk like a rotten skunk whose carcass had been shoved to the side of the the road. That rotten skunk would be Rosenstein's reputation as a straight arrow. He's as bent as any of his more infamous predecessors.
Keep Calm and Ignore Trump's Tweets
Note that the Nazi mentioned below appears in the above.
Update:
On Seeing Sebastian Gorka On A News Video Just Now
GET THAT DAMNED NAZI OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE THEN OUT OF THE COUNTRY!
IT SHOULD BE IN THE CONSTITUTION, NO DAMNED NAZIS IN THE GOVERNMENT!
IT SHOULD BE IN THE CONSTITUTION, NO DAMNED NAZIS IN THE GOVERNMENT!
It's Not A Matter Of Proof It's A Matter Of What Will Get You Looked Askance At And Whispered About In The Faculty Lounge
I am not really big on the "proving the existence of God" stuff because I've never been convinced that proof was relevant to the issue. Over the course of my adulthood I've been mildly interested in the question but early figured out that any way you handled it, for or against, you had to rely on premises you had to take on faith so you might as well just admit that it was a matter of belief.
Through looking at the pursuit of the debate in a more rigorous manner in the fifteen years or so since the beginning of the new atheism fad, considering just that issue of the argument being based on belief at the beginning (and so at the end) the conclusion isn't one that supports the belief that human beings are capable of anything but reliance on belief for anything, including science, mathematics and, in the ultimate impeachment of the concept of absolute knowledge, logic, itself.
You have to have accepted the truth of foundations of all of it, you might have accepted those foundational truths in your earliest childhood based on the experience of things reliably occurring or existing and on the basis of commonly shared common sense arising out of common experiences.
But those are probably some of the least rigorously examined of all beliefs because on their primitive acceptance everything else taken as to constitute rational experience and thought are based. Don't mistake that observation the way some of the jerks who troll me do, as the rinky-dink, Frosh class philosophical kind of debunkery of that experience as an exercise, that stuff is banal, frequently stupid and generally over done by uninspired teachers of such intro level classes. If someone is too stupid to, need more than the statement of the fact that their everyday experience of reality and rational thought are founded on faith, they don't belong in a Frosh philosophy class to start with. I've gone over the famous story told of D. T. Suzuki, the great scholar of Zen when asked by a famous Western philosopher if a table was real he. as it was told to me, answered rather impatiently (for a Zen scholar) "Yes". And when the Western philosopher pursued the matter, "In what sense is it real, Dr. Suzuki" the story goes he said, "In every sense".
This is a long way to saying someone encouraged me to watch a William Lane Craig video, Arguments for God's Existence | Worldview Apologetics Conference 2017, that was put up yesterday or the day before. Figuring I needed something to get me away from politics for a few minutes, I watched it. expecting I'd find it a little irritating in the "Is this table real" way.
I have watched a number of Craig's debates with famous atheists such as Lawrence Krauss and Sean Carroll and was impressed a lot more with his grasp of the cosmological issues and his handling of arguments for the existence of God than those of his opponents. Larry Krauss embarrassed himself and unintentionally exposed some of the most threadbare and dishonest of atheist tactics that I used to think he was above. Sean Carroll did better but only managed to keep Craig from mopping the floor with him. I find Craig somewhat less impressive when it comes to dealing with such matters as the question of evil and on matters where I think his reliance on, not a fundamentalist reading of the scriptures but a far more literalist one than I accept, is unpersuasive. Though many do find him as impressive on that, he's wildly popular with a lot of people, he's respected by many atheist philosophers. I respect him, especially as a philosopher and a debater, but I find my inspiration elsewhere.
Anyway, I watched the video which you can here. It lasts 49 minutes. I'm not going to cue any particular part of it. There are one or two places where I lost the thread of his thought but I think that's because I hadn't done much reading on those issues, the ones I had read on seemed soundly argued, to me.
As I mentioned, I expected to find the video irritating but it wasn't too bad in that way. As I listened to it, as I thought about the ways in which his arguments would be attacked by atheists (they tend to be as predictable in their attacks on arguments as they are in their arguments) and something else happened.
I started asking myself other questions that have been occurring to me more lately. Questions of the levels of evidence that are considered respectable in academia and in the common received secular wisdom, in the media and other lower mid-brow venues of attitude transmission, the kind of thinking accorded respectability and the violation of which will get someone looked askance at, smiled condescendingly to or be used to attack someone's standing, something which is understood to be unacceptable. The kind that marks them as a cooties carrier, which is what it boils down to.
The Kalam argument that one of the two short films deal with is handled well by Craig, it is an argument he has thought about deeply, I believe he's written on it. It is, though, the one I find less persuasive. At least that's how I caught my self thinking about it as I listened.
Then I thought, really, what other things in the list of the things one is required to believe have better arguments to support them?
How many of the things which we accept every day on the authoritative statements of scientists have we ever thought of with the same level of rigor as Craig presents that argument with on even a popular level? And a lot of the things we are expected to believe as a matter of faith, on the declaration of scientists or other experts, are far more contrary to our everyday experience. And that's the real science, not the frequently baseless claims of behavioral scientists which, when you look at the published science, is obvious garbage, sometimes blatant nonsense.
His presentation of the fine tuning of the constants of nature led to me asking how many people who accept the values of those constants as a matter of secular fact understand them at all. Even the ones who actually know what they mean, so a minority of the audience, do so as a matter of fact instead of on the basis of having understood the arguments that support them. I don't even understand what most of them are, but I am supposed to, as a member of the educated population, accept them on the say so of scientists, on faith.
Even taking as a given those constants are accurately measured, are real as defined and have the enormous range of merely physical consequences asserted as made for them, many people with degrees and careers in science believe in them on a faith surpassing the faith that one would have to accept the one for the existence of God based on them.
If you believe they are real and if you believe the statements about the fine tuning of them and the consequences made by the most eminent of cosmologists (many of them atheists) of the possible tiniest variations in those values as not permitting a life supporting universe, the belief that fine tuning inevitably implies the existence of God to well past the range of reasonable doubt is not an unrespectable conclusion.
Why is it respectable and accepted that science can define them and reveal an effective range of their properties and consequences on faith that must be based on mere authoritative acceptance of their word but a simpler logical argument based on that faith, as a given, is considered unrespectable? The arguments for it are certainly stronger than the ones Craig discussed which assert the multiverse or the various schemes proposed to get by the other big problem of the origin of the universe in an absolute beginning. I'll point out that Craig's claim that a multiverse and its mechanism of creation would almost certainly have to be fine-tuned itself makes a lot more sense to me than the atheist assertions that motivated cosmologists to make it up out of nothing.
Yet atheists will get upset with you when you express skepticism about these ultimate claims of would-be science for which there is absolutely no evidence at all except for the ideological motives of their creators. And they didn't even think them out past where they wanted to stop. An infinite God would be logically concluded to be capable of creating an infinite number of universes, so that got them nowhere, anyway. Instead of creating a jillion universes while facing down the bad news that people would be led to believe in God due to the Big Bang theory, they grasped at intellectual straws.
In the end I don't think the issue is one of whether or not people find those arguments persuasive, I think the issue is whether or not they can admit that they do find them persuasive without suffering the kind of pressure to keep quiet about it or be shunned in respectable company. I think that is mostly a question of fashion and social coercion to conform to the current intellectual fashions and the anxious feeling of insecure and ignorant people to want to seem in with that than it does anything to do with reason or knowledge. I've come to the conclusion that many religious believers, even many I disagree with as I do Craig, are quite intelligent and are often entirely more prepared to argue their case than even the most eminent of atheist intellectuals. For me one of the greatest consequences of the new atheist fad was that when I went back and looked at the arguments of atheists, even the best of them, they depended far more on coercive fashions, bullying and misrepresentations than their opponents.
I have handled that in the typical Irish manner that annoys Britatheists and those in the fashion capitols such as New York City so much, I just decided not to care about their disdain.
I do think that the use of science to support faith is no less respectable than the use of it to support atheism. That, I think is a truth that becomes more obvious with looking closely at this. I think that if the range of things said by scientists about the fine-tuning of those constants persist over time that they make a far better argument that the physical universe exhibits features leading to conclusions of design than they do random chance producing the universe we experience and which human study has revealed. Though I think that the argument from design will never really be treatable by science because science, by its rules, is unequipped to handle it, it is an intellectually respectable claim.
It's not what I found persuaded me. That was my experience of life and my reading of history. Fact checking the common anti-religious claims of history and seeing how many of those are blatant lies didn't add much to the atheist side of the scales. I think the thing that persuaded me most to go from unfocused and generalized faith to believing was the Gospel of Jesus, a closer reading of The Law and the Prophets and, in the end, a closer reading of the Pauline epistles taking into account that he was writing to specific groups of people living embedded in the pagan culture they had to deal with, with the range of habits and expectations their new faith would have to deal with and other such things. The frequently cited advice to slaves was coupled with reminders to slave owners that The Gospel required them to treat slaves as they would want to be treated - as effective a means of ending slavery as any ever devised, of husbands who were considered by the pagan, Roman law to be absolute despots that their legal despotism had to, as well, acknowledge their wives' right to the same reciprocal treatment according to the words of Jesus. In virtually every one of the passages in Paul used by those who wanted to violate equality, he provided the refutation of their claims. He was not as radical as Jesus was but Jesus wasn't establishing a church, he was announcing something more radical than that, the Kingdom of God. But that's a different and more complicated set of arguments. Compared to that, the existence of God stuff is Frosh level.
Through looking at the pursuit of the debate in a more rigorous manner in the fifteen years or so since the beginning of the new atheism fad, considering just that issue of the argument being based on belief at the beginning (and so at the end) the conclusion isn't one that supports the belief that human beings are capable of anything but reliance on belief for anything, including science, mathematics and, in the ultimate impeachment of the concept of absolute knowledge, logic, itself.
You have to have accepted the truth of foundations of all of it, you might have accepted those foundational truths in your earliest childhood based on the experience of things reliably occurring or existing and on the basis of commonly shared common sense arising out of common experiences.
But those are probably some of the least rigorously examined of all beliefs because on their primitive acceptance everything else taken as to constitute rational experience and thought are based. Don't mistake that observation the way some of the jerks who troll me do, as the rinky-dink, Frosh class philosophical kind of debunkery of that experience as an exercise, that stuff is banal, frequently stupid and generally over done by uninspired teachers of such intro level classes. If someone is too stupid to, need more than the statement of the fact that their everyday experience of reality and rational thought are founded on faith, they don't belong in a Frosh philosophy class to start with. I've gone over the famous story told of D. T. Suzuki, the great scholar of Zen when asked by a famous Western philosopher if a table was real he. as it was told to me, answered rather impatiently (for a Zen scholar) "Yes". And when the Western philosopher pursued the matter, "In what sense is it real, Dr. Suzuki" the story goes he said, "In every sense".
This is a long way to saying someone encouraged me to watch a William Lane Craig video, Arguments for God's Existence | Worldview Apologetics Conference 2017, that was put up yesterday or the day before. Figuring I needed something to get me away from politics for a few minutes, I watched it. expecting I'd find it a little irritating in the "Is this table real" way.
I have watched a number of Craig's debates with famous atheists such as Lawrence Krauss and Sean Carroll and was impressed a lot more with his grasp of the cosmological issues and his handling of arguments for the existence of God than those of his opponents. Larry Krauss embarrassed himself and unintentionally exposed some of the most threadbare and dishonest of atheist tactics that I used to think he was above. Sean Carroll did better but only managed to keep Craig from mopping the floor with him. I find Craig somewhat less impressive when it comes to dealing with such matters as the question of evil and on matters where I think his reliance on, not a fundamentalist reading of the scriptures but a far more literalist one than I accept, is unpersuasive. Though many do find him as impressive on that, he's wildly popular with a lot of people, he's respected by many atheist philosophers. I respect him, especially as a philosopher and a debater, but I find my inspiration elsewhere.
Anyway, I watched the video which you can here. It lasts 49 minutes. I'm not going to cue any particular part of it. There are one or two places where I lost the thread of his thought but I think that's because I hadn't done much reading on those issues, the ones I had read on seemed soundly argued, to me.
As I mentioned, I expected to find the video irritating but it wasn't too bad in that way. As I listened to it, as I thought about the ways in which his arguments would be attacked by atheists (they tend to be as predictable in their attacks on arguments as they are in their arguments) and something else happened.
I started asking myself other questions that have been occurring to me more lately. Questions of the levels of evidence that are considered respectable in academia and in the common received secular wisdom, in the media and other lower mid-brow venues of attitude transmission, the kind of thinking accorded respectability and the violation of which will get someone looked askance at, smiled condescendingly to or be used to attack someone's standing, something which is understood to be unacceptable. The kind that marks them as a cooties carrier, which is what it boils down to.
The Kalam argument that one of the two short films deal with is handled well by Craig, it is an argument he has thought about deeply, I believe he's written on it. It is, though, the one I find less persuasive. At least that's how I caught my self thinking about it as I listened.
Then I thought, really, what other things in the list of the things one is required to believe have better arguments to support them?
How many of the things which we accept every day on the authoritative statements of scientists have we ever thought of with the same level of rigor as Craig presents that argument with on even a popular level? And a lot of the things we are expected to believe as a matter of faith, on the declaration of scientists or other experts, are far more contrary to our everyday experience. And that's the real science, not the frequently baseless claims of behavioral scientists which, when you look at the published science, is obvious garbage, sometimes blatant nonsense.
His presentation of the fine tuning of the constants of nature led to me asking how many people who accept the values of those constants as a matter of secular fact understand them at all. Even the ones who actually know what they mean, so a minority of the audience, do so as a matter of fact instead of on the basis of having understood the arguments that support them. I don't even understand what most of them are, but I am supposed to, as a member of the educated population, accept them on the say so of scientists, on faith.
Even taking as a given those constants are accurately measured, are real as defined and have the enormous range of merely physical consequences asserted as made for them, many people with degrees and careers in science believe in them on a faith surpassing the faith that one would have to accept the one for the existence of God based on them.
If you believe they are real and if you believe the statements about the fine tuning of them and the consequences made by the most eminent of cosmologists (many of them atheists) of the possible tiniest variations in those values as not permitting a life supporting universe, the belief that fine tuning inevitably implies the existence of God to well past the range of reasonable doubt is not an unrespectable conclusion.
Why is it respectable and accepted that science can define them and reveal an effective range of their properties and consequences on faith that must be based on mere authoritative acceptance of their word but a simpler logical argument based on that faith, as a given, is considered unrespectable? The arguments for it are certainly stronger than the ones Craig discussed which assert the multiverse or the various schemes proposed to get by the other big problem of the origin of the universe in an absolute beginning. I'll point out that Craig's claim that a multiverse and its mechanism of creation would almost certainly have to be fine-tuned itself makes a lot more sense to me than the atheist assertions that motivated cosmologists to make it up out of nothing.
Yet atheists will get upset with you when you express skepticism about these ultimate claims of would-be science for which there is absolutely no evidence at all except for the ideological motives of their creators. And they didn't even think them out past where they wanted to stop. An infinite God would be logically concluded to be capable of creating an infinite number of universes, so that got them nowhere, anyway. Instead of creating a jillion universes while facing down the bad news that people would be led to believe in God due to the Big Bang theory, they grasped at intellectual straws.
In the end I don't think the issue is one of whether or not people find those arguments persuasive, I think the issue is whether or not they can admit that they do find them persuasive without suffering the kind of pressure to keep quiet about it or be shunned in respectable company. I think that is mostly a question of fashion and social coercion to conform to the current intellectual fashions and the anxious feeling of insecure and ignorant people to want to seem in with that than it does anything to do with reason or knowledge. I've come to the conclusion that many religious believers, even many I disagree with as I do Craig, are quite intelligent and are often entirely more prepared to argue their case than even the most eminent of atheist intellectuals. For me one of the greatest consequences of the new atheist fad was that when I went back and looked at the arguments of atheists, even the best of them, they depended far more on coercive fashions, bullying and misrepresentations than their opponents.
I have handled that in the typical Irish manner that annoys Britatheists and those in the fashion capitols such as New York City so much, I just decided not to care about their disdain.
I do think that the use of science to support faith is no less respectable than the use of it to support atheism. That, I think is a truth that becomes more obvious with looking closely at this. I think that if the range of things said by scientists about the fine-tuning of those constants persist over time that they make a far better argument that the physical universe exhibits features leading to conclusions of design than they do random chance producing the universe we experience and which human study has revealed. Though I think that the argument from design will never really be treatable by science because science, by its rules, is unequipped to handle it, it is an intellectually respectable claim.
It's not what I found persuaded me. That was my experience of life and my reading of history. Fact checking the common anti-religious claims of history and seeing how many of those are blatant lies didn't add much to the atheist side of the scales. I think the thing that persuaded me most to go from unfocused and generalized faith to believing was the Gospel of Jesus, a closer reading of The Law and the Prophets and, in the end, a closer reading of the Pauline epistles taking into account that he was writing to specific groups of people living embedded in the pagan culture they had to deal with, with the range of habits and expectations their new faith would have to deal with and other such things. The frequently cited advice to slaves was coupled with reminders to slave owners that The Gospel required them to treat slaves as they would want to be treated - as effective a means of ending slavery as any ever devised, of husbands who were considered by the pagan, Roman law to be absolute despots that their legal despotism had to, as well, acknowledge their wives' right to the same reciprocal treatment according to the words of Jesus. In virtually every one of the passages in Paul used by those who wanted to violate equality, he provided the refutation of their claims. He was not as radical as Jesus was but Jesus wasn't establishing a church, he was announcing something more radical than that, the Kingdom of God. But that's a different and more complicated set of arguments. Compared to that, the existence of God stuff is Frosh level.
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