Sunday, November 1, 2015

Hate Mail - Let Me Make It Entirely Simple For The Simple

Once you have chosen to believe that there are beneficial effects that come from killing those you deem "unfit" and there is no moral prohibition on killing them that you have to take seriously enough to refrain from killing them, the identity of those you deem to be "unfit" is a detail.  

 There have been many such groups deemed to be "unfit" in the history of biological genocide as there has been when the believed benefits of killing them are not explicitly biological but are benefits of political or economic or social advantage.  There is a larger taxonomic grouping which includes all such morally nihilistic ideologies. 

 The original line of thought which Darwin took up, Malthusianism, was certainly based on a benefit to the upper classes, not on the basis of the alleged biological superiority of the survivors.  If anything Darwinism made Malthusianism more dangerous because of its holding that the deaths of the "unfit" would be beneficial in the next generation.   

 The central depravity of the whole thing begins with the moral nihilism of intentional killing as an aspect of instrumental thinking.  The further depravity begins with Darwin superstitiously believing that any selective factors which nature might use to kill off those who would be cut off from the future were discernible by science on the basis of human perceptions of utility and "fitness" when there was absolutely nothing that demonstrated that human selection had anything to do with what would happen in the wild.  If anything the fact that humans found the variations they chose to cull out with slaughter would indicate the two things were, actually, NOTHING ALIKE.   That a member of the British upper class came up with that massively arrogant idea doesn't surprise me for a split second.  If a member of the beleaguered British poor or destitute were coming up with the idea I'd wonder if they didn't see things differently and a member of a minority discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity in Britain wouldn't come up with even a different idea. 

 Update:   2 Comments 

2 comments:

  1. Let me make it even simpler for you, numb nuts:

    If tomorrow a scholar found an Edison cylinder of Charles Darwin giving a speech advocating the mass execution of people he personally disliked, that would not change the fact that the reason the Nazis prioritized the murder of six million Jews was centuries of European Christian anti-Semitism. And your continued assertions to the contrary are bullshit Holocaust revisionIsm at best.
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    1. I have learned one thing from interacting with you, Simels, it is that it was a huge mistake to allow the most ignorant and biggest jerks with the fewest morals to define the boundaries in which discussion of the mass murders of the Nazis would be discussed, but such was done. I will point out that Rabbi Sacks said something about that too,

      "Now moral relativism seems to be the most tolerant form of morality — you do what you want to do and I will do what I want to do. However, it actually leads to enormous intolerance because if there is no objective standard of morality, how am I going to show I’m right? And when that happens, it is the loudest, angriest, rudest voice that wins."

      It works as a description of the error in letting the biggest assholes rule the internet discussion, as well.

      Shorter Simels: "Nothing more than way too simple can be said."
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12 comments:

  1. steve simelsNovember 1, 2015 at 9:10 AM

    Let me make it even simpler for you, numb nuts:

    If tomorrow a scholar found an Edison cylinder of Charles Darwin giving a speech advocating the mass execution of people he personally disliked, that would not change the fact that the reason the Nazis prioritized the murder of six million Jews was centuries of European Christian anti-Semitism. And your continued assertions to the contrary are bullshit Holocaust revisionIsm at best.

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    1. The Thought CriminalNovember 1, 2015 at 9:22 AM

      I have learned one thing from interacting with you, Simels, it is that it was a huge mistake to allow the most ignorant and biggest jerks with the fewest morals to define the boundaries in which discussion of the mass murders of the Nazis would be discussed, but such was done. I will point out that Rabbi Sacks said something about that too,

      "Now moral relativism seems to be the most tolerant form of morality — you do what you want to do and I will do what I want to do. However, it actually leads to enormous intolerance because if there is no objective standard of morality, how am I going to show I’m right? And when that happens, it is the loudest, angriest, rudest voice that wins."

      It works as a description of the error in letting the biggest assholes rule the internet discussion, as well.

      Shorter Simels: "Nothing more than way too simple can be said."

      Delete
  2. RmjNovember 1, 2015 at 11:16 AM

    It seems to be perfectly clear: anti-semitism and existed in Europe for centuries. There were virtually no Jews in England when Shakespeare was alive, but that's because they were driven out of England, not because of some mass extermination in the British Isles.

    Even the pogroms of the Russian Emperor weren't as systematic as Nazi Germany.

    And the difference is eugenics. The very idea of "purifying the race" can be traced directly back to the writings of Darwin and his associates. Without that, you don't have the impetus to set the machinery of death in motion on such an industrial scale.

    Nor an explanation as to why eugenics, embraced so completely in America that Germany learned from it, vanished so thoroughly from public acceptance after WWII.

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  3. The Thought CriminalNovember 1, 2015 at 11:28 AM

    Notably, it didn't vanish from scientists thinking. Both Watson and Crick were both scientific racists based on natural selection and eugnicists. Even many liberal scientists held or promoted eugenic ideas in the post-war period. Linus Pauling was a notable example. Then there were the outright eugenicists and scientific racists like Arthur Jensen ( whose cause Crick, the "Teller" of the Penn and Teller of genetics, championed) and William Shockley of that hilarious Nobel laureate stud farm. Apparently Julian Huxley not only advocated eugenics well past the fall of the Nazis but fathered a bunch of children through sperm donation, he, unsurprisingly, held himself up as an example of the highest quality of proven sires. I don't recall ever, once, reading a eugenicist who figured they or their bloodlines weren't of the high type.

    Then there is the covert eugenic character of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. As I recall Richard Dawkins got a bit of attention for himself, between such things as bashing 14-year-old geeks and saying a bit of mild pedophile abuse by public school teachers was harmless by promoting a form of eugenics.

    Scientism is also one of the components of eugenics, from the most passive forms up to and including the mass murder kind.

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  4. RmjNovember 1, 2015 at 11:49 AM

    Where it goes by other names. As I say, there's a reason there was a "Eugenics War" in the mythos of "Star Trek." And why, in that mythos, it was a very, very bad thing. It was Roddenberry re-imagining the Nazis one more time, before civilization did away with such things in order to become perfect and harmonious in the "Star Trek" future.

    The public did away with it after the Holocaust. Scientists who held on to it did so because of both scientism and because of a lack of any system of morality except expediency, which is basically the morality of utilitarianism.

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  5. JRNovember 1, 2015 at 7:21 PM

    nice... completely writing people like the Comte de Gobineau out of history to fit your pet hypothesis. you guys are hilarious

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  6. The Thought CriminalNovember 1, 2015 at 7:57 PM

    I don't recall, utter racist that he was, did he advocate the beneficial effects of mass murder? If he didn't do that then he is irrelevant to the theme of this post.

    I can cite numerous examples in which Charles Darwin blatantly asserted that the deaths of groups of people he deemed inferior would leave the survivors in a superior state. He left that in absolutely no doubt, not only in The Descent of Man but also in the 5th and 6th editions of Origin of Species, the ones in which he says, as blatantly, that his Natural Selection is the same thing as Suvival of the Fittest. Without someone dying there are no survivors. And that is the common conception of his Natural Selection in the succeeding generations, I recently quoted several eminent Darwinists, such as Karl Pearson on that. You think you know more about it that Karl Pearson or Leonard Darwin who pretty much said the same thing about his father's theory.

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  7. steve simelsNovember 1, 2015 at 9:28 PM

    "Even the pogroms of the Russian Emperor weren't as systematic as Nazi Germany.

    And the difference is eugenics"

    No, you braying jackass, the difference is a) the virulence of German (Christian) anti-Semitism and b) the German national character, which shall we say is noticeably more efficient than anybody elses, if you know what I mean.

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  8. The Thought CriminalNovember 2, 2015 at 7:06 AM

    What a stupid thing to say, Simels. There was massive antisemitism in Russia, it was the Russian antisemitic establishment who produced one of the most massively dangerous forgeries of all times, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the viciousness of the progroms were widely discussed in the pre-war era.

    The mass murders of Stalin were quite effective and efficient, he was a more accomplished mass murderer than Hitler his regime was just as scientific in its thinking as the Nazis. If that efficiency is your claim than that is certainly an aspect of scientific and sociological thinking, not Christianity. Nothing about any of the mass murders was consistent with anything in Christianity, the largest part of the resistance to Nazism, the strongest opposition to it was by Christians, including clergy, nuns, Bishops, Cardinals, Popes and, even more so, the lay people who resisted and protected Jews and others targeted by the Nazis at risk of their own lives. While they were doing that the atheist, Stalin, was making nice with Hitler, seeing if they couldn't come up with some way to carve up Poland and other countries they both had their eyes on conquering.

    Your concept of the Holocaust is entirely vulgar, ahistorical, dishonest and calculated to serve your own bigotry and parochialism. It is the view of an ignorant American whose knowledge of that time is based primarily on fiction, movies and TV shows. It has everything to do with the bigory of an American atheist and nothing to do with an interest in understanding what happened and nothing to do with preventing it from happening ever again. That thinking is what I was talking about when I wrote about Nazi thinking earlier today. You've got more in common with them than you'd like to believe possible. It's no surprise that your primary venue of expressing yourself is in the wreckage of Eschaton, trashed by the adolescents after the adults abandoned it.

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  9. The Thought CriminalNovember 2, 2015 at 7:13 AM

    Oh, and, let me point it out to you, Sims, that as your cultural heroes here were still big fans of Stalin, he was definitely not saying "Never Again" as he was in the initial stages of his great purge of the Jews from the Soviet Union, his "Jewish Doctors plot". If he hadn't, thankfully, had a stroke (or perhaps have been poisoned by Beria) and died in his own filth as his inner circle of thugs did nothing, out of fear, or, more likely, to ensure the death of a man as dangerous to them as he was to Jews, it's quite likely he could have continued what Hitler and the Einsatzgruppen started. I really don't want to bet that he couldn't have been as effective a mass murderer of Jews as Hitler had been, Stalin had even more practice at that than Hitler did at the time he started having people murdered, his practice run of murdering the disabled who you've not expressed a single word of regret about that I can recall, no more than I can recall you mentioning any of the other groups that Hitler targeted for extermination. If I heard some member of one of those other groups discounting his murders of Jews, I'd point out the same thing to them.

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  10. steve simelsNovember 2, 2015 at 11:14 AM

    "I'd point out the same thing to them."

    After discounting his murder of Jews yourself? Even you aren't that big a hypocrite, Sparky. :-)

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  11. The Thought CriminalNovember 2, 2015 at 11:45 AM

    That you think acknowledging the murders of the disabled, Pols, Roma, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, all of the groups counted among those murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust museum is "discounting his murder of Jews" proves what I said about you. It is a line that has nothing to do about the people who were murdered and everything to do with their usefulness to you. It's all about you, if you were Polish, those would be the only victims of the Nazi murders who mattered to you, if you were a gay man, those would be the only murders that mattered to you. If it had been Germans murdered by someone and you were German, those would be the only ones who mattered to you. You really do display Nazi style valuation of people on the basis of YOUR ethnic identity, it's ethnic supremacy, just a different ethnicity.

    Well, I don't do that, I'm a democrat and believe that all people are endowed with equal rights and far surpass the vulgar transaction in evaluation of them on the basis of value and utility. That's a difference between someone who believes the Jewish scriptures, in the First and the Second Testaments and someone who doesn't.

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