I like these sampler sites, you get to listen to lots of things by writers you'd never hear otherwise and if it's not great, it's over in less than twenty minutes. None of it commercials.
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Saturday Night Radio Drama - New Shorts from Radio New Zealand
Another week where I'm posting a link to a series of short plays instead of a single drama. Been too much weeding for me to look for a full length play.
Someone just accused me of being a
Philistine
nounDefinition of Philistine
(Entry 1 of 2)
2
often not capitalized
a
: a person who is guided by materialism and is usually disdainful of intellectual or artistic values
b
: one uninformed in a special area of knowledge
It's Mirriam Webster online. The word doesn't mean what the putz thinks it means, which is no surprise be cause he is guided by materialism and is always disdainful of intellectual and artistic values and is uninformed in EVERY area of knowledge.
I wish I had a dollar for every time someone with a kolleg edukation uses a two-dollar word wrong.
It's Mirriam Webster online. The word doesn't mean what the putz thinks it means, which is no surprise be cause he is guided by materialism and is always disdainful of intellectual and artistic values and is uninformed in EVERY area of knowledge.
I wish I had a dollar for every time someone with a kolleg edukation uses a two-dollar word wrong.
Hate Mail
Darwin famously, or perhaps not famously enough said
With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?*
Which debunking would apply to all areas of human thought, science, mathematics, even logic. While I don't buy all of his conclusions or even all of his methods,** Alvin Plantinga has made a good argument in this area giving the atheist-materialist-"naturalist" a choice, either they can believe in natural selection, with all of the usefulness that theory has been for the promotion of atheism or they can have the very mental faculties they constructed natural selection with and including LITERALLY EVERY OTHER PART OF HUMAN CULTURE, what they like as well as what they don't like, which natural selection, like all materialist-atheist theory seems, rather quickly, to undercut and erode.
Atheism is, at its core, a destructive ideological preference, it is based in denying possibilities, denying the capacity of people who believe what they don't like to possibly be right. It is not constructive. Materialism can only be true if it is false. A culture of materialism cannot but erode the felt necessity to tell the truth, it is destructive of the founding truths of traditional American democracy, even the truncated list given by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
* I have a far higher view of animal minds than Darwin did or is typical of conventional Darwinists. I don't, though, believe such minds are a product of natural selection, I think natural selection is a class-based delusion which will, eventually, be set aside as not very helpful for the understanding of evolution. It has certainly had disastrous consequences for the human species through eugenics and an enhanced form of scientific racism, sexism and class inequality.
** One thing I've heard Plantinga say that I don't agree with is that a theorized belief that could "succeed" in producing more offspring, which is the only thing that natural selection deals with, has a 50-50 chance of being true or false. I think it has a far higher chance of being false than true because truth has a far narrower scope of possible form than those many ways in which an idea can be false. Somewhere I read someone point out that Mormonism in all of its bizarre, ahistorical, con-man created nonsense encourages Mormons to reproduce at a far higher than average rate. In terms of natural selection their false beliefs are wildly successful, no matter how false they are.
With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?*
Which debunking would apply to all areas of human thought, science, mathematics, even logic. While I don't buy all of his conclusions or even all of his methods,** Alvin Plantinga has made a good argument in this area giving the atheist-materialist-"naturalist" a choice, either they can believe in natural selection, with all of the usefulness that theory has been for the promotion of atheism or they can have the very mental faculties they constructed natural selection with and including LITERALLY EVERY OTHER PART OF HUMAN CULTURE, what they like as well as what they don't like, which natural selection, like all materialist-atheist theory seems, rather quickly, to undercut and erode.
Atheism is, at its core, a destructive ideological preference, it is based in denying possibilities, denying the capacity of people who believe what they don't like to possibly be right. It is not constructive. Materialism can only be true if it is false. A culture of materialism cannot but erode the felt necessity to tell the truth, it is destructive of the founding truths of traditional American democracy, even the truncated list given by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
* I have a far higher view of animal minds than Darwin did or is typical of conventional Darwinists. I don't, though, believe such minds are a product of natural selection, I think natural selection is a class-based delusion which will, eventually, be set aside as not very helpful for the understanding of evolution. It has certainly had disastrous consequences for the human species through eugenics and an enhanced form of scientific racism, sexism and class inequality.
** One thing I've heard Plantinga say that I don't agree with is that a theorized belief that could "succeed" in producing more offspring, which is the only thing that natural selection deals with, has a 50-50 chance of being true or false. I think it has a far higher chance of being false than true because truth has a far narrower scope of possible form than those many ways in which an idea can be false. Somewhere I read someone point out that Mormonism in all of its bizarre, ahistorical, con-man created nonsense encourages Mormons to reproduce at a far higher than average rate. In terms of natural selection their false beliefs are wildly successful, no matter how false they are.
Friday, July 26, 2019
On Being Asked To Comment About Gw P
I couldn't pick her out of a lineup of one but from what I'm reading about her, not having ever seen Gwynneth Paltrow may be one of the benefits of having stopped watching movies in the 1980s, give or take a few I've seen while visiting people who were watching them. Those, for the most part have made me glad I don't much bother with them, either. They suck.
It would shock some people how much I don't miss the movies.
It would shock some people how much I don't miss the movies.
Robin Eubanks and EB3 - Pentacourse
Kenwood Dennard, Drums bass keyboard
Robin Eubanks, Trombone, bass keyboard
Keyboards, Orrin Evans, bass keyboard
This is one of my favorite groups who produced one of my favorite albums, this is one of my favorite pieces from them. Fascinating rhythm way beyond anything Gershwin thought of. It's been going through my head all day.
You Won't Fix The United States Without Overhauling The Constitution, We Aren't Even Discussing How We Really Got Ratfucked
Well, I'm not of
high enough character that I won't crow about predicting how the
Mueller hearings would go, that Mueller like a good boy-scout would
follow the rules set up by his good buddy William Barr, rules made to
impede his testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence
Committees from holding Trump's treason, the treason of his corrupt
regime accountable, to prevent the prevention of the repetition of those crimes
committed with billionaire criminals foreign and domestic. The
myth of Mueller rang hollower than the thud of a broken bell, even
with the excellent preparation and questioning of the House Democrats
in those hearings. In the habits of superficiality cultivated by too
many hours of being entertained - the practical formation of the
minds and character of all too many of even liberal Americans - his
studied dullness of presentation is what seems to have made the
biggest impression, not the masterful questioning by the Democratic
members of the two committees.
Anyone who wasn't
favorably impressed with the questioning of them, the discipline and
organization of the questioning, especially by the Judiciary
Committee members, who Mueller obviously was less cooperate with, is
either too stupid to have an opinion worth listening to or they're
corrupt, themselves. That would constitute a majority of the
official "left" which is to say the secular-"left"
so bereft of seriousness or moral purpose as the secular left seems
to inevitably devolve into. In the absence of moral purpose instant
gratification and entertainment are substituted for keeping your eyes
on the necessary end of things. That "left" works best as
a tool for the right because they inevitably promote giving up and
cynical stalling at the start and aren't really good for much else.
I've decided to go
back to the project I started last year but which stalled out of
typing out and commenting on the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips'
book detailing the slave-holder corruptions built into the United
States Constitution, The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact: or
Extracts From the Madison Papers, etc. Selected By Wendell Phillips
The things discovered by Phillips in the then newly published papers
of James Madison and others, some of them explicitly stating their
motives in setting things up favoring inequality, slavery, the
protection of slavery even against the will of the majority of voters
in the United States are as relevant today as they were then. The
mechanisms of corruption by the Supreme Court today and over the past
two centuries, the corruptions of the Electoral College which has
given us two losers of elections as president since the start of this
century, alone, every mechanism of corruption up to and including the
Senate refusing to protect the 2020 election from the manipulations
of the gangster-dictator of Russia! are included in the Constitution,
put their by slave holders with the overt intent of furthering
inequality which benefited them and their heirs, of thwarting
equality and rule by the majority of Americans. There are later
corruptions introduced by the Supreme Court which are as relevant,
the Sullivan Decision, Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. but
they found their excuses to enable lying and the financial corruption
of our elections system in the language of that original Constitution
set up to thwart democracy and self-government by an adequately
informed people of good will.
I have come to see
that a lot of our assumptions and habits of thought about such things
are destructive of even our nobler aspirations. The criticism I've
made of free speech absolutism has scandalized many liberals even as
they decry the lies empowered by their faith in empowering liars to
lie. It clearly takes a lot to overcome even such self-contradictory
habits of belief, slogans that hamper observation or even drawing
logical conclusions such as when FOX is able to sell lies constructed
for easy sale with impunity, their audience will act on those lies
and give us a series of the worst administrations and Congresses in
our history. That is a direct consequence of the Warren Court
started chain of "free speech" rulings that permitted the
media to lie in their own interest with impunity. That, of course,
would have not been nearly as developed in Wendell Phillips time,
even mass distribution newspapers and magazines being a future
development. Still, I think until we take what he discovered
seriously for today, until we start to develop habits of deep
self-questioning and critical thinking about our assumptions and most
cherished slogans, things will only get worse. What we can do about
the daddy-issues reliance on saviors as unlikely as the romanticized
Robert Mueller, as sold in the MSNBC liberal ghetto hours of our
media, I'd suggest repeating the mantra "movies aren't real"
might help a bit with that. "Aaron Sorkin is a putz,"
might help, too.
Goddamned Blogger's Acting Up
I don't know what the hell is up with the html of my morning post, I'll type the whole damned thing out again later. Until then, here's the introduction to Wendell Phillip's book discussed in it.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Quick, Almost Random Thoughts On The Mueller Show.
The expectations that Robert Mueller was going to put the case for impeachment over the top, or even that he was just going to kick-start it was ridiculously unrealistic. The common as dirt movie plot gimmick of the savior daddy figure has made even educated people extremely unrealistic, that unrealism is ubiquitous, apparently.
The very things that made Mueller's reputation, of being a well-functioning cog in the machine of the legal establishment is what makes him unwilling to go beyond the specifications of his functioning to keep it from driving off a cliff. For crying out loud, he was OK enough with the oozing sleaze and manipulation of the law of his friend William Barr whose known history has been as an engine of Republican-fascist corruption and criminality, no doubt if pressed to give an answer Mueller would come up with some legalistic - bureaucratic babble to excuse Barr's conduct.
Well, I've been warning you for a time about that kind of annoyingly respectable boy-scouting based on following rules to the letter, it's been obvious for a long, long time that the rules as written, and as corruptly interpreted by courts and lawyers who figure their job is to find ways to do as much bad as you can while not technically breaking the law as written are what brought us here. All human made systems are imperfect, even with the best of intentions, such legal types are trained in finding out how to not only break but to smash the clear moral intent of the law in order to allow those able to do what they want to. Or who have the money to hire those who will do it for them. There's a reason that Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen is in prison for doing things that Trump ended up in the White House, ordering him to do them.
The system as it is got us to this, the law as interpreted down the centuries by that engine of such legalistic loophole finding and expanding and cutting through to allow worse, the Supreme Court, other courts, is not what's going to save us. A master of it - which I don't think Robert Muller is, though he is a student of the masters - is not going to admit that the system, itself, is inadequate to protect egalitarian democracy.
---------------------------
My biggest annoyance in this is that the media, from top to twitter level, is putting the blame for Trump still being in office IN EXACTLY THE WRONG PLACE. It isn't House Democrat's fault that Trump was put there, it isn't their fault that it is next to impossible for them, in their position in the Constitutional system UNDER REAL LIFE CONDITIONS, to get him out of there no matter how obvious his criminality, no matter how obvious his dangerous unfitness for the position that Republican voters put him into.
The carping at Democrats in the House when it is Republicans in the House and the Senate and in the media and who vote in elections who gave us Trump is symptomatic of the even bigger defect in American democracy, the corrupted electorate. Since it is the media that has lied and corrupted the morals of enough Americans to produce presidencies by a series of corrupt, criminal Republican administration and two completely illegitimate regimes put into office by minority vote, for them to blame Democrats is just them continuing their practices that got us here.
In the end Trump is in office, placed there, maintained there by the electorate, by the effectively managed parts of the electorate that produced Republican majorities in the Senate, large enough margins of Republicans who will never vote to impeach and remove Trump from office - we have never had a Republican minority large enough to remove a Republican criminal from the presidency, the one chance that might have happened, Nixon, is unknown because it was not tested. It is just possible there were enough semi-honest Republicans in 1974 to have removed him from office, though it is just as possible that that would have failed. We like to imagine it would have happened, then, it is sheer delusion for anyone to think it would have happened in any of the forty-five years after that AND TODAY'S REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THE MOST CORRUPT IT HAS BEEN AT ANY TIME IN THE COUNTRIES EXISTENCE, EVEN THE MOST CORRUPT CONGRESSES AND SENATES OF THE 19TH CENTURY CAN'T SURPASS IT IN CORRUPTION.
The demand that the Democrats in the House do what can't be done because of Republicans is, itself, a demonstration of unreality, exactly the kind of unreality that got us here. It is a product of most peoples' civics education coming from Hollywood, from entertainment that isn't required to give us an image of reality. The late night comedians*, even those who do a good job, aren't likely to tell you the truth about that, they're as part of their system as Robert Mueller is. That they are frequently the foremost truth tellers in 2019, Trump ridden America is a demonstration of the problems we have gotten into.
The Hebrew prophets describing the corruption of ancient Israel have a lot to teach us about what got us here. Their descriptions of corrupted People and the governments that inevitably arise when People are led astray and the wide ranging consequences are going to tell you more than even Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee will, and Colbert and Bee will tell you more than anyone in the journalistic side of things. Much as I like her work most times, Rachel Maddow, one of if not the smartest of them was holding the torch for Mueller so long that I think she must have felt it burn her hand yesterday.
We are in a mess that the habits and traditional mechanisms of American democracy won't get us out of, it is what was manipulated to get us here. The media that lied to us and corrupted us by selling us what we most wanted instead of what we most needed, scientifically taking advantage of our strongest weakenesses was how we were corrupted. TV, other media are the vehicles that drove us over the cliff, the fantasy cop-daddy figure of Robert Mueller isn't going to save us. I don't think he would be willing to break the rules to do it. He will not be blamed for the systematic inadequacies that created this catastrophe.
The very things that made Mueller's reputation, of being a well-functioning cog in the machine of the legal establishment is what makes him unwilling to go beyond the specifications of his functioning to keep it from driving off a cliff. For crying out loud, he was OK enough with the oozing sleaze and manipulation of the law of his friend William Barr whose known history has been as an engine of Republican-fascist corruption and criminality, no doubt if pressed to give an answer Mueller would come up with some legalistic - bureaucratic babble to excuse Barr's conduct.
Well, I've been warning you for a time about that kind of annoyingly respectable boy-scouting based on following rules to the letter, it's been obvious for a long, long time that the rules as written, and as corruptly interpreted by courts and lawyers who figure their job is to find ways to do as much bad as you can while not technically breaking the law as written are what brought us here. All human made systems are imperfect, even with the best of intentions, such legal types are trained in finding out how to not only break but to smash the clear moral intent of the law in order to allow those able to do what they want to. Or who have the money to hire those who will do it for them. There's a reason that Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen is in prison for doing things that Trump ended up in the White House, ordering him to do them.
The system as it is got us to this, the law as interpreted down the centuries by that engine of such legalistic loophole finding and expanding and cutting through to allow worse, the Supreme Court, other courts, is not what's going to save us. A master of it - which I don't think Robert Muller is, though he is a student of the masters - is not going to admit that the system, itself, is inadequate to protect egalitarian democracy.
---------------------------
My biggest annoyance in this is that the media, from top to twitter level, is putting the blame for Trump still being in office IN EXACTLY THE WRONG PLACE. It isn't House Democrat's fault that Trump was put there, it isn't their fault that it is next to impossible for them, in their position in the Constitutional system UNDER REAL LIFE CONDITIONS, to get him out of there no matter how obvious his criminality, no matter how obvious his dangerous unfitness for the position that Republican voters put him into.
The carping at Democrats in the House when it is Republicans in the House and the Senate and in the media and who vote in elections who gave us Trump is symptomatic of the even bigger defect in American democracy, the corrupted electorate. Since it is the media that has lied and corrupted the morals of enough Americans to produce presidencies by a series of corrupt, criminal Republican administration and two completely illegitimate regimes put into office by minority vote, for them to blame Democrats is just them continuing their practices that got us here.
In the end Trump is in office, placed there, maintained there by the electorate, by the effectively managed parts of the electorate that produced Republican majorities in the Senate, large enough margins of Republicans who will never vote to impeach and remove Trump from office - we have never had a Republican minority large enough to remove a Republican criminal from the presidency, the one chance that might have happened, Nixon, is unknown because it was not tested. It is just possible there were enough semi-honest Republicans in 1974 to have removed him from office, though it is just as possible that that would have failed. We like to imagine it would have happened, then, it is sheer delusion for anyone to think it would have happened in any of the forty-five years after that AND TODAY'S REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THE MOST CORRUPT IT HAS BEEN AT ANY TIME IN THE COUNTRIES EXISTENCE, EVEN THE MOST CORRUPT CONGRESSES AND SENATES OF THE 19TH CENTURY CAN'T SURPASS IT IN CORRUPTION.
The demand that the Democrats in the House do what can't be done because of Republicans is, itself, a demonstration of unreality, exactly the kind of unreality that got us here. It is a product of most peoples' civics education coming from Hollywood, from entertainment that isn't required to give us an image of reality. The late night comedians*, even those who do a good job, aren't likely to tell you the truth about that, they're as part of their system as Robert Mueller is. That they are frequently the foremost truth tellers in 2019, Trump ridden America is a demonstration of the problems we have gotten into.
The Hebrew prophets describing the corruption of ancient Israel have a lot to teach us about what got us here. Their descriptions of corrupted People and the governments that inevitably arise when People are led astray and the wide ranging consequences are going to tell you more than even Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee will, and Colbert and Bee will tell you more than anyone in the journalistic side of things. Much as I like her work most times, Rachel Maddow, one of if not the smartest of them was holding the torch for Mueller so long that I think she must have felt it burn her hand yesterday.
We are in a mess that the habits and traditional mechanisms of American democracy won't get us out of, it is what was manipulated to get us here. The media that lied to us and corrupted us by selling us what we most wanted instead of what we most needed, scientifically taking advantage of our strongest weakenesses was how we were corrupted. TV, other media are the vehicles that drove us over the cliff, the fantasy cop-daddy figure of Robert Mueller isn't going to save us. I don't think he would be willing to break the rules to do it. He will not be blamed for the systematic inadequacies that created this catastrophe.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Brought Up Like The Dog Ate Trash
Duncan Black is your typical play-lefty who knows that all he has to do to get his stable of play-mates going is to diss Democrats. I've been listening to the Mueller testimony and I think the Democrats are clearly and obviously very well prepared, their questioning is clearly organized to follow narratives of obstruction of justice in order, both within and among Democratic Representatives AND THEY ARE DEALING MASTERFULLY WITH THE PREDICTABLE HOSTILITY MUELLER HAS TO ANSWER QUESTIONS.
Given the nature of Eschaton, a rump of remaining whiny crybabies led by a lazy play-lefty who isn't even much interested in going through the motions anymore, for them to be slamming the House Judiciary Committee Democrats in this hearing is laughable. I wouldn't even bother with this if it wasn't typical of that kind of play-lefty idiocy. I increasingly find I don't bother with them anymore. I don't think I'll bother listening to Sam Seder or his buddies on this hearing, I certainly won't be listening to Cenk (once and future Republican) on it. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time he's 60 Duncan is voting Republican.
If you like me doing this, go on showing me what he's posted. I'm not especially interested.
Given the nature of Eschaton, a rump of remaining whiny crybabies led by a lazy play-lefty who isn't even much interested in going through the motions anymore, for them to be slamming the House Judiciary Committee Democrats in this hearing is laughable. I wouldn't even bother with this if it wasn't typical of that kind of play-lefty idiocy. I increasingly find I don't bother with them anymore. I don't think I'll bother listening to Sam Seder or his buddies on this hearing, I certainly won't be listening to Cenk (once and future Republican) on it. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time he's 60 Duncan is voting Republican.
If you like me doing this, go on showing me what he's posted. I'm not especially interested.
As Muller Talks
I think Robert Mueller just announced he's going to be part of his buddy William Barr's obstruction. He's a Republican hack, he's not going to do anything to help the House investigation.
Update: If he stands behind his report, why isn't he willing to say what it says in his report? I think the Democrats have prepared for the expected refusal of Mueller to say much of anything other than "what it says in the report". I don't think he's going to provide much useful to them. So far it doesn't even seem as if he's going to admit that while he didn't find enough evidence of Trump-Putin cooperation to bring an indictment that for an American president OR PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ANY INVOLVEMENT WITH FOREIGN DICTATORS IS UNACCEPTABLE. Though, clearly, from the Republicans' behavior, they're not much bothered by there being some level of collusion between a Republican-fascist and the dictator of Russia. Why should they? They've managed the sale of the country to domestic gangsters for decades, both in the elected branches and on the Court. That's the party Mueller was a part of for decades into that sell out.
Update 2: What the hell? He won't even say that if McGahn lied to him that it was a crime? Rep. Cedric Robertson's quick comeback on that shows that the Democrats got the Mueller form of non-answering just right and they prepared for it. I don't know what the definition of a hostile witness was but it's clear Mueller is hostile to backing up his investigation in any way that he doesn't have Barr's permission for.
Update: If he stands behind his report, why isn't he willing to say what it says in his report? I think the Democrats have prepared for the expected refusal of Mueller to say much of anything other than "what it says in the report". I don't think he's going to provide much useful to them. So far it doesn't even seem as if he's going to admit that while he didn't find enough evidence of Trump-Putin cooperation to bring an indictment that for an American president OR PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ANY INVOLVEMENT WITH FOREIGN DICTATORS IS UNACCEPTABLE. Though, clearly, from the Republicans' behavior, they're not much bothered by there being some level of collusion between a Republican-fascist and the dictator of Russia. Why should they? They've managed the sale of the country to domestic gangsters for decades, both in the elected branches and on the Court. That's the party Mueller was a part of for decades into that sell out.
Update 2: What the hell? He won't even say that if McGahn lied to him that it was a crime? Rep. Cedric Robertson's quick comeback on that shows that the Democrats got the Mueller form of non-answering just right and they prepared for it. I don't know what the definition of a hostile witness was but it's clear Mueller is hostile to backing up his investigation in any way that he doesn't have Barr's permission for.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Answer To A Callowly Made Complaint
There is all the difference in the world in making claims of probability and random chance when those are made in an imaginary, theoretical infinity of time and a practical and still imaginary infinity of purported numbers and taking seriously the meaning of theorized improbabilities and random chances working their way out in the very limited time and very limited numbers of reality.
The phenomena of the real universe and, far more so, life on the one and only planet we know it arose and evolved on forces the numbers of theorized probability and random chance into a very limited time frame and number of entities in which those have a chance to be expressed in reality. I would need to have an explanation of how that difference isn't important before I could take the ideological use of them by scientistic, atheist, materialists any more seriously than I would any other ideological use of them.
I'm not convinced that when you take those most real of humanly experienced realities into account that they could do what the atheist cosmologists and Darwinian biologists want them to do for their ideological campaign. I think that the presence of that ideological campaign, firmly set in not only the culture but the literature of science is as much of a scandal if someone were to insert religious belief into them. Only no one bats an eyelash when it's atheist ideology so inserted.
As things stand, everything said about "other universes" is ideologically motivated make-believe, not a product of knowledge or evidence as there is none to inform it. Everything said about "other life" on planets in the one universe which has the decided but not presently useful advantage of us knowing those planets exist is make believe of almost the same level of ignorance and lack of evidence. Until "other life" is known and available for us to look at in depth - don't wait up nights or hold your breath - it's best seen as science fiction, also inserted directly into science where it has no real business being.
Update: Yeah, I'm saying that when an atheist, materialist says "probability" or "random chance" my bull shit detector is tripped because unless they can make a good case that those are more than just slogans in the context they spout them in, it's bull shit designed to cover up their inability to make a good argument. I'm extremely skeptical of it in those two cases I cited, multi-universe cosmological fiction and the claim that evolution happens through a combination of random chance and probability. When those seem to work at such incredible improbabilities at even a theoretical infinity of time and discrete entities but only have been able to work within the very much shorter time that 14 billion years are and the number of discrete objects in the universe are, they deserve to be considered with proportionate skepticism as an answer to why things are as we can observe they are.
The phenomena of the real universe and, far more so, life on the one and only planet we know it arose and evolved on forces the numbers of theorized probability and random chance into a very limited time frame and number of entities in which those have a chance to be expressed in reality. I would need to have an explanation of how that difference isn't important before I could take the ideological use of them by scientistic, atheist, materialists any more seriously than I would any other ideological use of them.
I'm not convinced that when you take those most real of humanly experienced realities into account that they could do what the atheist cosmologists and Darwinian biologists want them to do for their ideological campaign. I think that the presence of that ideological campaign, firmly set in not only the culture but the literature of science is as much of a scandal if someone were to insert religious belief into them. Only no one bats an eyelash when it's atheist ideology so inserted.
As things stand, everything said about "other universes" is ideologically motivated make-believe, not a product of knowledge or evidence as there is none to inform it. Everything said about "other life" on planets in the one universe which has the decided but not presently useful advantage of us knowing those planets exist is make believe of almost the same level of ignorance and lack of evidence. Until "other life" is known and available for us to look at in depth - don't wait up nights or hold your breath - it's best seen as science fiction, also inserted directly into science where it has no real business being.
Update: Yeah, I'm saying that when an atheist, materialist says "probability" or "random chance" my bull shit detector is tripped because unless they can make a good case that those are more than just slogans in the context they spout them in, it's bull shit designed to cover up their inability to make a good argument. I'm extremely skeptical of it in those two cases I cited, multi-universe cosmological fiction and the claim that evolution happens through a combination of random chance and probability. When those seem to work at such incredible improbabilities at even a theoretical infinity of time and discrete entities but only have been able to work within the very much shorter time that 14 billion years are and the number of discrete objects in the universe are, they deserve to be considered with proportionate skepticism as an answer to why things are as we can observe they are.
Prelude To The Pavane Of Prevarication By Propriety
I strongly suspect that in a little over 24 hours we are going to find that Robert Mueller is at least as much a Republican Party man as he is an "institutionalist" which I think will be seen most realistically as a word that means "ass coverer". Remember Rod Rosenstein was also touted as an "institutionalist" when he was enough of an ass coverer that James Comey noted that. Only he said he was worried about him because he was a "survivor".
I think Robert Mueller was looking for an excuse to not answer questions when he sought Department of William Barr guidance on his upcoming testimony, testimony he was on record as being reluctant to give and which, at this point, the House Judicial and Intelligence committees should compel if he stonewalls as I expect him to. I think Mueller's testimony is what must be the last straw before they go after Barr and the rest of his crew of Trump lawyers on the public dime. They should go after their pay and other personal benefits, including their retirement, money being the one and only value that such gangsters have. They should lay a good case for the disbarment of Barr and others who are involved with obstruction of justice. If it means anything to him, they should be ready and willing to take down Mueller if he does anything more to obstruct justice.
I suspect we are less than 48 hours from finding that the faith placed in Robert Mueller was unwise wishful thinking, daddy issues fantasy, that like the sterling character so many of his colleagues were willing to give James Comey and Rod Rosenstein, it wasn't worth the air it was declared in. I've mentioned before that Republicans have been repeatedly had such claims made about them, when was the last time you really saw one of those live up to the hype?
Robert Mueller should never have needed to be subpoenaed to testify to the House on these matters, he should never have needed to be negotiated with or have needed the members of the House to do the courtly little pavane pantomime of propriety with him. At this point, if he turns out to be anything like the man of honor he's sold as instead of the Republican hack I am expecting him to continue to prove himself to be, I'll buy a hat and eat it.
I think Robert Mueller was looking for an excuse to not answer questions when he sought Department of William Barr guidance on his upcoming testimony, testimony he was on record as being reluctant to give and which, at this point, the House Judicial and Intelligence committees should compel if he stonewalls as I expect him to. I think Mueller's testimony is what must be the last straw before they go after Barr and the rest of his crew of Trump lawyers on the public dime. They should go after their pay and other personal benefits, including their retirement, money being the one and only value that such gangsters have. They should lay a good case for the disbarment of Barr and others who are involved with obstruction of justice. If it means anything to him, they should be ready and willing to take down Mueller if he does anything more to obstruct justice.
I suspect we are less than 48 hours from finding that the faith placed in Robert Mueller was unwise wishful thinking, daddy issues fantasy, that like the sterling character so many of his colleagues were willing to give James Comey and Rod Rosenstein, it wasn't worth the air it was declared in. I've mentioned before that Republicans have been repeatedly had such claims made about them, when was the last time you really saw one of those live up to the hype?
Robert Mueller should never have needed to be subpoenaed to testify to the House on these matters, he should never have needed to be negotiated with or have needed the members of the House to do the courtly little pavane pantomime of propriety with him. At this point, if he turns out to be anything like the man of honor he's sold as instead of the Republican hack I am expecting him to continue to prove himself to be, I'll buy a hat and eat it.
Monday, July 22, 2019
The Sacrifice of Everything At The Altar of no-God
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.
Archibald MacLeish: The End of The World
I think the difference between atheism and belief in God, by whom I mean the God of monotheism is most often a difference between people who, at their core, either are willing to accept that they have moral responsibilities and obligations to other People, other living beings and those who would rather not accept that and are willing to give up things in order to deny their moral obligations. That wasn't my discovery, though I came to something like that independently through observation, Nietzsche's demented philosophy of amorality is one of the most explicit articulations of the atheist side of that and long before him Bernard Mandeville and others had gone a long way to that end. Nietzsche had the intellectual integrity or the amoral degeneracy to admit that materialism, scientism, atheism meant people were relieved of the obligation to act morally, though such relief comes with a steep price in that such an intellectual stand cannot be consistent with any kind of meaning or means of valuation of any meaning. To be consistent such an atheist cannot logically claim that their life, the life of their nearest and dearest (if such they retain) of their family, of their university department ( the only two spheres of moral obligations that the popular expert in such good and evil among atheists today, Steven Weinberg, claims for himself) or anything else has any place in a reckoning of good and evil, importance or triviality, meaning and meainglessness. In short, to deny moral obligations that impinge on them, such atheism inevitably reduces the moral obligations that such atheists can claim are owed them by other people who are as freed from moral obligations - or rather any sense of them - that impinge on the libertarian atheist.
Nietzsche did note that there were such atheists who maintained an ever weakening, ever looser sense of moral obligation out of habit and cultural habit but he correctly noted that with such atheism such a sense of moral obligation would, with time, vanish leaving only ruthless power and strength in its place, the very things that moral obligation exists to restrain or overcome.
I don't find most atheists have Nietzsche's honesty about that some who will spout that nihilism as even a scientific claim such as Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell will, at the same time and at complete odds with their science, claim some kind of contradictory morality. That is certainly related to their equally irrational and inconsistent claims made for science which, itself, cannot survive the materialist program of degradation of all human aspirations, including to the quest to obtain knowledge and find meaning. Trump's amoral nihilism is a mild form of what is the consequence of the most popular ideological stand among atheists, vulgar materialism will be more durable than intellectual materialism because all materialism inevitably leads to the reduction of meaning into meaninglessness, even the valuation put on human posterity has proven to be sacrificed on the altar of immorality dedicated to the no-God of atheism. The hardest form of predestination is the atheist nihilist assignment of us all to an oblivion which their belief begins at our conception, at our birth, before we were born, at the Big Bang when everything that happened is, ultimately, held to have been determined, none of it having any meaning, at all.
I see this in a thousand different ways, every week in Trumpian-Putinian-Xiist 2019.
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.
Archibald MacLeish: The End of The World
I think the difference between atheism and belief in God, by whom I mean the God of monotheism is most often a difference between people who, at their core, either are willing to accept that they have moral responsibilities and obligations to other People, other living beings and those who would rather not accept that and are willing to give up things in order to deny their moral obligations. That wasn't my discovery, though I came to something like that independently through observation, Nietzsche's demented philosophy of amorality is one of the most explicit articulations of the atheist side of that and long before him Bernard Mandeville and others had gone a long way to that end. Nietzsche had the intellectual integrity or the amoral degeneracy to admit that materialism, scientism, atheism meant people were relieved of the obligation to act morally, though such relief comes with a steep price in that such an intellectual stand cannot be consistent with any kind of meaning or means of valuation of any meaning. To be consistent such an atheist cannot logically claim that their life, the life of their nearest and dearest (if such they retain) of their family, of their university department ( the only two spheres of moral obligations that the popular expert in such good and evil among atheists today, Steven Weinberg, claims for himself) or anything else has any place in a reckoning of good and evil, importance or triviality, meaning and meainglessness. In short, to deny moral obligations that impinge on them, such atheism inevitably reduces the moral obligations that such atheists can claim are owed them by other people who are as freed from moral obligations - or rather any sense of them - that impinge on the libertarian atheist.
Nietzsche did note that there were such atheists who maintained an ever weakening, ever looser sense of moral obligation out of habit and cultural habit but he correctly noted that with such atheism such a sense of moral obligation would, with time, vanish leaving only ruthless power and strength in its place, the very things that moral obligation exists to restrain or overcome.
I don't find most atheists have Nietzsche's honesty about that some who will spout that nihilism as even a scientific claim such as Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell will, at the same time and at complete odds with their science, claim some kind of contradictory morality. That is certainly related to their equally irrational and inconsistent claims made for science which, itself, cannot survive the materialist program of degradation of all human aspirations, including to the quest to obtain knowledge and find meaning. Trump's amoral nihilism is a mild form of what is the consequence of the most popular ideological stand among atheists, vulgar materialism will be more durable than intellectual materialism because all materialism inevitably leads to the reduction of meaning into meaninglessness, even the valuation put on human posterity has proven to be sacrificed on the altar of immorality dedicated to the no-God of atheism. The hardest form of predestination is the atheist nihilist assignment of us all to an oblivion which their belief begins at our conception, at our birth, before we were born, at the Big Bang when everything that happened is, ultimately, held to have been determined, none of it having any meaning, at all.
I see this in a thousand different ways, every week in Trumpian-Putinian-Xiist 2019.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Probability In The Gaps The god Of Ideological, Scientistic Atheism - Hate Mail
The creationist-cosmologists (they being the creator(s) of infinities of universes) require infinities in which to work their probabilistic arguments against the possibility of God creating the universe and life and everything, including every single thing that scientists can fit into a model of physical causation (though nothing they can do in that line of endeavor can explain the ultimate cause or any possible purpose in it).
When you're talking about even the universe of our experience, the only thing that can be treated scientifically, however, you aren't talking about theoretical probabilities working on things in an infinitely large, infinitely long time to be sorted out by random chance. THAT IS ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT LIFE IN WHICH IT HAS TO WORK TO PRODUCE LIVING ORGANISMS WHICH, AS LIVING ORGANISMS, WE MIGHT BE FORGIVEN FOR BEING RATHER INTERESTED IN. Oddly enough, the biologists who should understand those limits don't often seem to notice them, knowing that they are required to carry the banner of infinite probability into their field of very limited, time lapsing phenomena. I've gone over the absurd notion that DNA produces chains of amino acids which, then, fold themselves in just the right way to produce the needed biological action within cells when if it did that by some trial and error scheme under random chance, it would take the life of the universe and then some for all of the probabilities possible to be sorted out every time that happens. Clearly, something within the cellular chemistry "knows" how to do that to have the "desired" effect, something which, itself, is not coded in DNA which clearly doesn't seem to "know" how to do that, whatever that is, I doubt scientists have ever even considered.
To say "probability" or "random chance" when those wouldn't work in the limited number of organisms in the limited number of billions of years, of years, of months, of days, of seconds in which those things happen (all of them taking time to happen) is to say nothing. The illusion of probability being responsible for the phenomenon of life as it evolved on Earth, as it is sustained within any given organism is persuasive but only if you ignore the actual problems involved with that and only if your motive in doing that is ideological and not scientific. I have learned a lot from watching the ranting and raving of Jerry Coyne against his colleagues such as James Shapiro who is one of the rare scientists who admit that that old scheme of random chance and probability doesn't work in addressing the reality of life as it presents itself. Whether or not there is divine intention driving evolution (not to mention the plain day-to-day working of any given, surviving organism) it's clear that the old atheist stand by of attributing everything to probability whenever explanation fails is inadequate. Divine intention is something that science is not competent to take up as a question for the same reasons given by Hans Kung in that passage I typed out this morning. Atheists who try to fight about the existence of God using science ideologically make exactly the same errors of judgement that those using science to "prove" God only they pretend to know better than to do that.
Note: Coyne rants and raves about just about everything, sooner or later. He's a high functioning nutcase.
When you're talking about even the universe of our experience, the only thing that can be treated scientifically, however, you aren't talking about theoretical probabilities working on things in an infinitely large, infinitely long time to be sorted out by random chance. THAT IS ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT LIFE IN WHICH IT HAS TO WORK TO PRODUCE LIVING ORGANISMS WHICH, AS LIVING ORGANISMS, WE MIGHT BE FORGIVEN FOR BEING RATHER INTERESTED IN. Oddly enough, the biologists who should understand those limits don't often seem to notice them, knowing that they are required to carry the banner of infinite probability into their field of very limited, time lapsing phenomena. I've gone over the absurd notion that DNA produces chains of amino acids which, then, fold themselves in just the right way to produce the needed biological action within cells when if it did that by some trial and error scheme under random chance, it would take the life of the universe and then some for all of the probabilities possible to be sorted out every time that happens. Clearly, something within the cellular chemistry "knows" how to do that to have the "desired" effect, something which, itself, is not coded in DNA which clearly doesn't seem to "know" how to do that, whatever that is, I doubt scientists have ever even considered.
To say "probability" or "random chance" when those wouldn't work in the limited number of organisms in the limited number of billions of years, of years, of months, of days, of seconds in which those things happen (all of them taking time to happen) is to say nothing. The illusion of probability being responsible for the phenomenon of life as it evolved on Earth, as it is sustained within any given organism is persuasive but only if you ignore the actual problems involved with that and only if your motive in doing that is ideological and not scientific. I have learned a lot from watching the ranting and raving of Jerry Coyne against his colleagues such as James Shapiro who is one of the rare scientists who admit that that old scheme of random chance and probability doesn't work in addressing the reality of life as it presents itself. Whether or not there is divine intention driving evolution (not to mention the plain day-to-day working of any given, surviving organism) it's clear that the old atheist stand by of attributing everything to probability whenever explanation fails is inadequate. Divine intention is something that science is not competent to take up as a question for the same reasons given by Hans Kung in that passage I typed out this morning. Atheists who try to fight about the existence of God using science ideologically make exactly the same errors of judgement that those using science to "prove" God only they pretend to know better than to do that.
Note: Coyne rants and raves about just about everything, sooner or later. He's a high functioning nutcase.
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rod Serling (presents) - Zero Hour - Two Stories (with period commercials!)
LOST IN TIME
FACE OF THE FOE
Murders, scary stuff, disturbing stuff, typical light summer fare when it's too hot to live. I'm going to go lie in a cold wire chair in front of a fan till September. At least that's my plan this afternoon.
Rod Serling wrote affectionately of his early work in the waning years of American radio drama, he loved the freedom the inexpensive format and indifference of executives allowed him. He revived it in the early 70s, after his TV show was cancelled.
"Secularism" Meh!
I'd much, much rather be dealing with the thinking of Brueggemann, Kung, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Susannah Heschel and Marilynne Robinson than the idiocy of the atheists but the atheists are the ones damaging the American left. I think that's been done largely by duping liberals into believing that secularism, an administrative necessity in an egalitarian democracy is some kind of moral requirement for the left, itself. We don't owe the sacrifice of the most powerful engine of liberal change in the history of the United States, the morality of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition, to the atheists. It was when that was done, beginning in the mid-1960s that the left started its nose dive into Nixonian, Reganite, Bushist and now Trumpian fascism. This is a political blog, after all, dedicated to the left winning by being true to its foundations and the foundation of those foundations. Atheists don't have a right to run the left into the ground to suit their very limited ends. And we've been stupid enough to let them do it. Well, no more. Not as Trump is in office and the Republicans have staffed the courts with fascists, white supremacists and traitors.
The Decay Of "Skepticism" The Decadence Of Atheist Materialism The Durability Of Theological Skepticism
I listened to several of Rebecca Watson's Youtubes and have to say that she's an idiot. She has an even more superficial knowledge or view of science than your typical NPR style of science reporter, I'm not even sure I'd put her at the level of your typical major network news reader feed writer on that count. I don't know if she still is on that podcast-radio program thing that Steven Novella (also a vehicle for him to hire his idiot family members) but any claim to scientific expertise he squeezes out of him having a career as a medical practitioner should be obliterated by her presence on it. If she's bad her audience, or at least the ones who comment in the comment sections are even stupider.
I don't, as a matter of fact, hold that questions of religion are treatable with the methods of science AS I MUST HAVE STATED A THOUSAND TIMES ONLINE, MANY OF THEM IN THESE PIECES I POST. As I mentioned, that's something that, if anything, the theologians I read have a deeper understanding of than any ideological atheist I've encountered does. That is due to something which I have to say I've been rather surprised to find while reading theologians such as Hans Kung, among the most exigent skeptical methodology I've encountered is practiced by such theologians, even as it is most definitely not even approached by the pro and semi-pro professional "skeptics" such as Watson, Novella and the others in the atheism industry. Here's an example of how Kung's skeptical method is applied to the question of the historical or scientific investigation of the Resurrection of Jesus.
Raising up as a historical event? Since according to New Testament faith the raising is an act of God within God's dimensions, it can not be a historical event in the strict sense: it is not an event which can be verified by historical science with the aid of historical methods. For the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the laws of nature, verifiable within the present world, not a supernatural intervention which can be located and dated to space and time. There was nothing to photograph or to record. What can be historically verified are the death of Jesus and after this the Easter faith and the Easter message of the disciples. But neither the raising itself nor the person raised can be apprehended, objectified, by historical methods. In this respect the question would demand too much of historical science - which, like the sciences of chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology or theology, never sees more than one aspect of the complex reality - since, on the basis of its own premises, it deliberately excludes the very reality which alone comes into question for a resurrection as also for creation and consummation: the reality of God.
Note what I presented in blue and underlined in that passage from On Being A Christian.
I give that passage, not as an argument for the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus, which Hans Kung's skeptical method contained in it would make a very difficult thing to use it for but as an example of how rigorous his methodology is.* He doesn't make the typical scientistic-materialist-atheist mistake of expecting a comprehensive view of reality from either rigorous science or rigorous history, he disqualifes them from being able to do that by admitting the severe limits that the best methodologies of both of those academic field INCLUDING HIS OWN FIELD OF THEOLOGY for being able to do that. I have seldom heard a scientists and never one who was involved in the "skepticism" racket admit that their own field is, by its very methodology, its very means of coming to reliable information about a very limited number of very specific things within observable physical phenomena which are susceptible to the honestly applied methods of science.
That said, I have to say that every time in the past two decades, when I've rigorously considered the atheist substitute for the Creator, God, the reliance on probability, or, rather, the mere rote recitation of the word without even a very deep consideration of whether or not it could get the job done as needed, the less probable its adequacy seems to me. That reliance on "random chance", especially as the early Darwinists presented it to the convincement of the very superficial and those who wanted to be relieved from having to restrain themselves due to moral considerations, is especially superficial because as the physical basis of life is discovered to be ever more complex, at every level looked at, from the alleged workings of "natural selection" down to the ever increasing complexity of molecular biology, the inadequacy of probabilistic random chance producing the complexity of life seems ever more improbable.
There is a habit of superficial thought that thinks of "probability" of "random chance" in purely abstract terms and then believing that when you apply those to specific, real world conditions with their very real limits of time in which the results came about and the numbers of organisms within which those results were achieved, in many cases the working through of the mathematically possible variations would seem to far, far, very, very far outstrip the actual time frame and populations in which those would have to work out with exquisite precision to have produced the results that we experience in the phenomenon of embodied life in the one and only case we know it worked, our life on Earth in the one and only universe we have any evidence exists outside of human imagination motivated to pretend others exist. I suspect that those vanishingly minute improbabilities which are generally considered so troubling to atheist ideologues who dominate the scientific profession of cosmology are huge compared to the improbabilities which would be encountered if the full range of biological complexity which did, actually, produce life on our one planet in our one universe was capable of being addressed in the same way. I think that if life arose in different forms, the complexities of that kind which produced those successful lives would increase by factors as large, perhaps larger ones that would have to be addressed in figuring the improbability of it happening here in the one reality which we can intelligently address.
And note, Kung would certainly see more fundamental problems than almost any scientist I've encountered with all of this as apprehending "the truth" of such things. One of the rare scientists I've read who seems to have had a good understanding of it was one of the greatest mathematical physicists of the 20th century, the Quaker, Eddington.
Every time I look at the "skepticism" industry, that subsidiary of the wider atheism industry, the more I'm convinced it is, actually, a product of superficiality and appeals to stupidity and laziness. That's why it has devolved from even the Martin Gardiner level of superficiality, down through the CSICOP-CFI style, down to the Steven Novellas and Rebecca Watsons. It is just so stupid at that, the TV mega-church preacher level of it.
* Also as a refutation to the idiotic claim that I practice "God in the gaps" thinking. God isn't found in gaps, God is imminent in creation, including those few parts of it science has addressed, everything science discovers. The only "god" you're going to find in gaps of science is not God but some inadequate cousin to the material gods of Greco-Roman paganism.
I don't, as a matter of fact, hold that questions of religion are treatable with the methods of science AS I MUST HAVE STATED A THOUSAND TIMES ONLINE, MANY OF THEM IN THESE PIECES I POST. As I mentioned, that's something that, if anything, the theologians I read have a deeper understanding of than any ideological atheist I've encountered does. That is due to something which I have to say I've been rather surprised to find while reading theologians such as Hans Kung, among the most exigent skeptical methodology I've encountered is practiced by such theologians, even as it is most definitely not even approached by the pro and semi-pro professional "skeptics" such as Watson, Novella and the others in the atheism industry. Here's an example of how Kung's skeptical method is applied to the question of the historical or scientific investigation of the Resurrection of Jesus.
Raising up as a historical event? Since according to New Testament faith the raising is an act of God within God's dimensions, it can not be a historical event in the strict sense: it is not an event which can be verified by historical science with the aid of historical methods. For the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the laws of nature, verifiable within the present world, not a supernatural intervention which can be located and dated to space and time. There was nothing to photograph or to record. What can be historically verified are the death of Jesus and after this the Easter faith and the Easter message of the disciples. But neither the raising itself nor the person raised can be apprehended, objectified, by historical methods. In this respect the question would demand too much of historical science - which, like the sciences of chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology or theology, never sees more than one aspect of the complex reality - since, on the basis of its own premises, it deliberately excludes the very reality which alone comes into question for a resurrection as also for creation and consummation: the reality of God.
Note what I presented in blue and underlined in that passage from On Being A Christian.
I give that passage, not as an argument for the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus, which Hans Kung's skeptical method contained in it would make a very difficult thing to use it for but as an example of how rigorous his methodology is.* He doesn't make the typical scientistic-materialist-atheist mistake of expecting a comprehensive view of reality from either rigorous science or rigorous history, he disqualifes them from being able to do that by admitting the severe limits that the best methodologies of both of those academic field INCLUDING HIS OWN FIELD OF THEOLOGY for being able to do that. I have seldom heard a scientists and never one who was involved in the "skepticism" racket admit that their own field is, by its very methodology, its very means of coming to reliable information about a very limited number of very specific things within observable physical phenomena which are susceptible to the honestly applied methods of science.
That said, I have to say that every time in the past two decades, when I've rigorously considered the atheist substitute for the Creator, God, the reliance on probability, or, rather, the mere rote recitation of the word without even a very deep consideration of whether or not it could get the job done as needed, the less probable its adequacy seems to me. That reliance on "random chance", especially as the early Darwinists presented it to the convincement of the very superficial and those who wanted to be relieved from having to restrain themselves due to moral considerations, is especially superficial because as the physical basis of life is discovered to be ever more complex, at every level looked at, from the alleged workings of "natural selection" down to the ever increasing complexity of molecular biology, the inadequacy of probabilistic random chance producing the complexity of life seems ever more improbable.
There is a habit of superficial thought that thinks of "probability" of "random chance" in purely abstract terms and then believing that when you apply those to specific, real world conditions with their very real limits of time in which the results came about and the numbers of organisms within which those results were achieved, in many cases the working through of the mathematically possible variations would seem to far, far, very, very far outstrip the actual time frame and populations in which those would have to work out with exquisite precision to have produced the results that we experience in the phenomenon of embodied life in the one and only case we know it worked, our life on Earth in the one and only universe we have any evidence exists outside of human imagination motivated to pretend others exist. I suspect that those vanishingly minute improbabilities which are generally considered so troubling to atheist ideologues who dominate the scientific profession of cosmology are huge compared to the improbabilities which would be encountered if the full range of biological complexity which did, actually, produce life on our one planet in our one universe was capable of being addressed in the same way. I think that if life arose in different forms, the complexities of that kind which produced those successful lives would increase by factors as large, perhaps larger ones that would have to be addressed in figuring the improbability of it happening here in the one reality which we can intelligently address.
And note, Kung would certainly see more fundamental problems than almost any scientist I've encountered with all of this as apprehending "the truth" of such things. One of the rare scientists I've read who seems to have had a good understanding of it was one of the greatest mathematical physicists of the 20th century, the Quaker, Eddington.
Every time I look at the "skepticism" industry, that subsidiary of the wider atheism industry, the more I'm convinced it is, actually, a product of superficiality and appeals to stupidity and laziness. That's why it has devolved from even the Martin Gardiner level of superficiality, down through the CSICOP-CFI style, down to the Steven Novellas and Rebecca Watsons. It is just so stupid at that, the TV mega-church preacher level of it.
* Also as a refutation to the idiotic claim that I practice "God in the gaps" thinking. God isn't found in gaps, God is imminent in creation, including those few parts of it science has addressed, everything science discovers. The only "god" you're going to find in gaps of science is not God but some inadequate cousin to the material gods of Greco-Roman paganism.
Friday, July 19, 2019
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Scientistic-Atheist-Materialists Who Want To Assert Equality Are Up The Creek Of Amorality Without A Paddle
Looking for appropriate video for my post last night, I came across a Youtube by the semi-pro atheist-"skeptic" Rebecca Watson talking about her disappointment with some of the science guys who have had an association with the child rapist and elite sex trafficker to the super-rich and powerful, Jeffrey Epstein. Specifically, she called out Lawrence Krauss who has so disgraced himself, especially in the period when he took the golden parachute from being an actual scientist to being a professional atheist. I didn't get very far into Watson's not entirely unreasonable flaming of her fellow atheist-"skeptics" and others for being total and complete pigs, that is one thing on which I and Watson agree pretty much before she said something that was absurd in a revelatory way. What she said was, contained in the first sentence of my comment.
"Krauss is a scientist so he knows what's right"? Geeesh, what a stupid thing to say. Science totally discounts morality in doing science, scientists are probably less likely to think in moral terms than those in other professions. Lots of them can and do think morally but it's not due to their science.
OK, it's been too hot to do much of the weeding I was hoping to get ahead of this week and too hot for any deep reading or thinking so I was bored and looking for a fight.* It also pisses me off that people who can say such stupidly romantic things about science in such abysmal ignorance get enough attention so they can make a sort-of career out of spouting it. And this morning I find one of her fans did answer it in a pretty stupid way.
"scientists are probably less likely to think in moral terms than those in other professions." Geeesh, what a stupid thing to say. And she said "he knows what's right" in terms of logic, not in terms of morality. Try to keep on top of it.
Pretty typical of ideological atheists, to which I answered.
Science has always, by formal agreement among scientists NOT INCLUDED QUESTIONS OF MORALITY IN THEIR SCIENTIFIC WORK. Anyone who doesn't know that holds some idiotic romantic view of what scientists do without knowing anything about what they actually do do. This has led, especially within those fields most dubiously included in what gets called science, which rub up against questions of morality, for the scientists involved to come up with some kind of clearly immoral declarations such as the one the Rutgers biologist Robert Trivers made about the crimes of Epstein, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous". If you aren't familiar with the so-called social scientists and even some in the legitimate field of evolutionary biology to declare that rape is "natural" (and so according to their thinking "good) and not such a big deal, you don't know what you're talking about and neither does Rebecca Watson, apparently. It led Richard Dawkins to declare that some level of pedophile abuse was no big deal. Logic can't get you to questions of right and wrong, something that has been known through rigorous logical application for just about as long as logical analysis started to be studied in rigorous terms. I am never shocked, anymore, to find out that ideological atheists are so plug ignorant of the culture of mathematics, logic and science.
I am sure just about any reputable theologian would have a rather good understanding of that but I'm increasingly unsurprised to find that many scientists and, ever much more so, their pop culture fan gals and guys are even more ignorant of that plain and simple fact, that you can't turn logic to the purpose of deciding questions of moral judgement. The most excellent practitioner of logic, of mathematics, of science who chooses to be immoral or, as I believe is far more common and so a serious problem, amoral are only more dangerous for their mastery of those areas of human culture which, by agreement, are shielded from questions of moral consideration.
But this leads me to consider the problem for the atheists and "skeptics" of the kind I've touched on before when I mocked the scientistic-atheist-materialists who, for themselves, claim the mantle of "Free Thought" when it is their very ideological side which has made the most sustained attack on the possibility of free thought, free will, - of anything free of deterministic, material causation - being possible.
It's clear that Rebecca Watson, as a woman who likes the idea of equality but whose career is founded in exactly that scientistic-materialistic-atheism is rather up the creek of amorality without a paddle. For anyone who had a realistic or even a mildly superficial knowledge of the history of the literature of science, as it deals with matters of sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, class equality would see that scientists - who are still among the most male, most white, most economically advantaged - have not been slow to assert that all of those issues and identities are unequal by hard fact of science, ignoring the scientific weakness or irrationality of their claimed "data" supporting their contentions, using every trick in their bag of those to dupe the public into believing, fully, in their sexist, racist, class-advantaged claims.
While there are many scientists who do not do that, the formal literature of biology, of the so-called behavioral sciences are full to the top of the assertion that biologically determined inequality is a hard fact of life. As I have made an in depth study of the literature of modern biology as concerns exactly those claims of inequality, that assertion has been a majority point of view since the imposition of natural selection and genetic determinism on the study of evolution and its asserted implications for human life and societies today. And a lot of scientists, even those whose own field of expertise renders their understanding of biology and behavior about as callow and superficial as the typical listener to of TV on those topics, fully buy onto that program of sexist, racist, class-divisive assertion in science BECAUSE THEY LIKE THAT THOSE THINGS ADVANTAGE THEM AND THEIR IMMEDIATE FAMILY AND COLLEAGUES.
Probably, by the way, even more dangerous is the popular level science reporting such as you can read in the so-called legitimate press or hear on NPR in the deepest level of superficiality that such "public understanding of science" is likely to be imbibed by most voters.
I can't claim that I have any respect for the people who obtain college credentials, who work in fields in which they write things for other people to read, who bloviate on such things online on on TV or radio talk shows while being in such total ignorance of these issues. I think if the "Skepchicks" (Watson's name for herself, so don't call me out on it) and the PZ Myers who might find that they either want to assert equality for themselves or through some vestigial remains of having grown up in the better part of Jewish monotheistic culture, feeling it's right, are deluding themselves if they think science and logic are going to replace the moral absolute that comes with the assertion that people have God given rights on an equal basis, they are not only wrong, they are willfully stupid.
* Too hot to sleep, too, which is why I've been up at three this morning and writing this.
"Krauss is a scientist so he knows what's right"? Geeesh, what a stupid thing to say. Science totally discounts morality in doing science, scientists are probably less likely to think in moral terms than those in other professions. Lots of them can and do think morally but it's not due to their science.
OK, it's been too hot to do much of the weeding I was hoping to get ahead of this week and too hot for any deep reading or thinking so I was bored and looking for a fight.* It also pisses me off that people who can say such stupidly romantic things about science in such abysmal ignorance get enough attention so they can make a sort-of career out of spouting it. And this morning I find one of her fans did answer it in a pretty stupid way.
Robert Dillahubris
2 hours ago
Pretty typical of ideological atheists, to which I answered.
Science has always, by formal agreement among scientists NOT INCLUDED QUESTIONS OF MORALITY IN THEIR SCIENTIFIC WORK. Anyone who doesn't know that holds some idiotic romantic view of what scientists do without knowing anything about what they actually do do. This has led, especially within those fields most dubiously included in what gets called science, which rub up against questions of morality, for the scientists involved to come up with some kind of clearly immoral declarations such as the one the Rutgers biologist Robert Trivers made about the crimes of Epstein, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous". If you aren't familiar with the so-called social scientists and even some in the legitimate field of evolutionary biology to declare that rape is "natural" (and so according to their thinking "good) and not such a big deal, you don't know what you're talking about and neither does Rebecca Watson, apparently. It led Richard Dawkins to declare that some level of pedophile abuse was no big deal. Logic can't get you to questions of right and wrong, something that has been known through rigorous logical application for just about as long as logical analysis started to be studied in rigorous terms. I am never shocked, anymore, to find out that ideological atheists are so plug ignorant of the culture of mathematics, logic and science.
I am sure just about any reputable theologian would have a rather good understanding of that but I'm increasingly unsurprised to find that many scientists and, ever much more so, their pop culture fan gals and guys are even more ignorant of that plain and simple fact, that you can't turn logic to the purpose of deciding questions of moral judgement. The most excellent practitioner of logic, of mathematics, of science who chooses to be immoral or, as I believe is far more common and so a serious problem, amoral are only more dangerous for their mastery of those areas of human culture which, by agreement, are shielded from questions of moral consideration.
But this leads me to consider the problem for the atheists and "skeptics" of the kind I've touched on before when I mocked the scientistic-atheist-materialists who, for themselves, claim the mantle of "Free Thought" when it is their very ideological side which has made the most sustained attack on the possibility of free thought, free will, - of anything free of deterministic, material causation - being possible.
It's clear that Rebecca Watson, as a woman who likes the idea of equality but whose career is founded in exactly that scientistic-materialistic-atheism is rather up the creek of amorality without a paddle. For anyone who had a realistic or even a mildly superficial knowledge of the history of the literature of science, as it deals with matters of sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, class equality would see that scientists - who are still among the most male, most white, most economically advantaged - have not been slow to assert that all of those issues and identities are unequal by hard fact of science, ignoring the scientific weakness or irrationality of their claimed "data" supporting their contentions, using every trick in their bag of those to dupe the public into believing, fully, in their sexist, racist, class-advantaged claims.
While there are many scientists who do not do that, the formal literature of biology, of the so-called behavioral sciences are full to the top of the assertion that biologically determined inequality is a hard fact of life. As I have made an in depth study of the literature of modern biology as concerns exactly those claims of inequality, that assertion has been a majority point of view since the imposition of natural selection and genetic determinism on the study of evolution and its asserted implications for human life and societies today. And a lot of scientists, even those whose own field of expertise renders their understanding of biology and behavior about as callow and superficial as the typical listener to of TV on those topics, fully buy onto that program of sexist, racist, class-divisive assertion in science BECAUSE THEY LIKE THAT THOSE THINGS ADVANTAGE THEM AND THEIR IMMEDIATE FAMILY AND COLLEAGUES.
Probably, by the way, even more dangerous is the popular level science reporting such as you can read in the so-called legitimate press or hear on NPR in the deepest level of superficiality that such "public understanding of science" is likely to be imbibed by most voters.
I can't claim that I have any respect for the people who obtain college credentials, who work in fields in which they write things for other people to read, who bloviate on such things online on on TV or radio talk shows while being in such total ignorance of these issues. I think if the "Skepchicks" (Watson's name for herself, so don't call me out on it) and the PZ Myers who might find that they either want to assert equality for themselves or through some vestigial remains of having grown up in the better part of Jewish monotheistic culture, feeling it's right, are deluding themselves if they think science and logic are going to replace the moral absolute that comes with the assertion that people have God given rights on an equal basis, they are not only wrong, they are willfully stupid.
* Too hot to sleep, too, which is why I've been up at three this morning and writing this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)