Gérard Souzay
Orchestre de chambre de la Radio Télévision Belge
direction Edgard Doneaux
Vocal Score
Sorry, not the ideal score but, it's easier to read than the full available online.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Ernest Chausson - Poème de l'amour et de la mer - Gérard Souzay
Gérard Souzay
Orchestre de chambre de la Radio Télévision Belge
direction Edgard Doneaux
Vocal Score
Sorry, not the ideal score but, it's easier to read than the full available online.
A New Modest Proposal
Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice. Richard Dawkins
Warning: Nazis will be mentioned.
The fine blogger, my friend, RMJ, has a very good post up about Richard Dawkins' recently self-generated, publicity Scheißesturm in which he presents the alleged moral imperative of aborting a child who will be born with Down Syndrome. As with all of his posts, RMJ's is more than worth reading, I'd recommend it over mine if you have to make a choice. I haven't had the chance to read through all of the various posts and tweets he links to yet. And while I've got a lot of ideas on the topic I'm not nearly ready to address those today I've been thinking of what to say, having done a lot of research into related topics and hardly having exhausted that material makes it hard to know how to get a grip on this aspect of it. I suspect there will be more posts later.
I strongly suspect that Richard Dawkins and many of his admirers have never known a person with Down Syndrome. I've known several and they were all rather nice, happy people who were beloved by their families and who got through live without ever hurting anyone. How many people with PhDs do you know who you'd have to say the opposite about on every point? Dawkins bases his chop logic "ethics" on an especially vulgar and simplistic utilitarian analysis, claiming that people with Down Syndrome subtract from the level of "happiness" in the world, a point which totally misrepresents that evidence quoted in this article in The Daily Beast. Having done a lot of research into questions of people being disposed with on the basis of utilitarian arguments, this reminds me of nothing so much than the great bass singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, decades later, being unable to talk about the "eugenic" murder of his beloved, disabled brother by the Nazis, who presumed to know more about him and his life than his own family on the basis of alleged science and human life being subject to their own form of utilitarian analysis.
I will insert that a lot of the sciency, "evidence based" commentators don't seem to know much of anything about the issue, some of them seem to not realize that most people with Down Syndrome are infertile and that the chances of them passing "it" on are slight and relevant in only some of those with the condition.
Warning: Nazis will be mentioned.
The fine blogger, my friend, RMJ, has a very good post up about Richard Dawkins' recently self-generated, publicity Scheißesturm in which he presents the alleged moral imperative of aborting a child who will be born with Down Syndrome. As with all of his posts, RMJ's is more than worth reading, I'd recommend it over mine if you have to make a choice. I haven't had the chance to read through all of the various posts and tweets he links to yet. And while I've got a lot of ideas on the topic I'm not nearly ready to address those today I've been thinking of what to say, having done a lot of research into related topics and hardly having exhausted that material makes it hard to know how to get a grip on this aspect of it. I suspect there will be more posts later.
I strongly suspect that Richard Dawkins and many of his admirers have never known a person with Down Syndrome. I've known several and they were all rather nice, happy people who were beloved by their families and who got through live without ever hurting anyone. How many people with PhDs do you know who you'd have to say the opposite about on every point? Dawkins bases his chop logic "ethics" on an especially vulgar and simplistic utilitarian analysis, claiming that people with Down Syndrome subtract from the level of "happiness" in the world, a point which totally misrepresents that evidence quoted in this article in The Daily Beast. Having done a lot of research into questions of people being disposed with on the basis of utilitarian arguments, this reminds me of nothing so much than the great bass singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, decades later, being unable to talk about the "eugenic" murder of his beloved, disabled brother by the Nazis, who presumed to know more about him and his life than his own family on the basis of alleged science and human life being subject to their own form of utilitarian analysis.
I will insert that a lot of the sciency, "evidence based" commentators don't seem to know much of anything about the issue, some of them seem to not realize that most people with Down Syndrome are infertile and that the chances of them passing "it" on are slight and relevant in only some of those with the condition.
Which leads me to being able to make my own proposal in line with this utilitarian -um- thinking.
Given the evidence presented here earlier this week, that atheists are less fit due to both their being more prone to illness and debility, more prone to bad habits (I'll leave out their habit of so often being royal pains and proponents of other peoples' deaths) and their demonstrated inability to achieve replacement levels of reproduction, the very definition of a maladaptation - it is a moral imperative that something must be done about it. I don't think that most of the big name atheists on the circuit today can be accused of adding more aggregate pleasure to the world than the pain they inflict. We should, at the very least, apply the advice given by utilitarians and analyze the question of the various ideologies in terms of their utilitarian virtue.
Is it, according to this line of logic, not desirable to discover a genetic predisposition for atheism and that those who are presented with the prospects of bringing an atheist into the world be allowed to choose to terminate the pregnancy?
If it is possible to test for atheism, then it is desirable, no, even a moral imperative for parents with the possibility of producing one to "try again"?
As the Buddha noted, all life is pain, confirmed by the observation that "man is born unto trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward". Since utilitarianism could, arguably, be used to dispose of any group deemed to add to the "pain" side of the scale, that being the only standard of judgement, then people with Down Syndrome cause a lot less pain than many people who Dawkins rubs elbows with at faculty lounges and in the elite circles he frequents. I think there is certainly a utilitarian imperative to empty out the upper eschalons of finance, the military-industrial complex, the sciences and academic fields that service them in their evil doing.... etc. Oddly, I don't ever remember utilitarian analysis being applied to the very classes who invented that stuff on their own class and the class of their sponsors. You almost get the idea that they invented it to be applied only to "the other".
Tell me why I'm wrong based on the reasoning of Richard Dawkins, his admirers and other fans of utilitarian analysis.
Given the evidence presented here earlier this week, that atheists are less fit due to both their being more prone to illness and debility, more prone to bad habits (I'll leave out their habit of so often being royal pains and proponents of other peoples' deaths) and their demonstrated inability to achieve replacement levels of reproduction, the very definition of a maladaptation - it is a moral imperative that something must be done about it. I don't think that most of the big name atheists on the circuit today can be accused of adding more aggregate pleasure to the world than the pain they inflict. We should, at the very least, apply the advice given by utilitarians and analyze the question of the various ideologies in terms of their utilitarian virtue.
Is it, according to this line of logic, not desirable to discover a genetic predisposition for atheism and that those who are presented with the prospects of bringing an atheist into the world be allowed to choose to terminate the pregnancy?
If it is possible to test for atheism, then it is desirable, no, even a moral imperative for parents with the possibility of producing one to "try again"?
As the Buddha noted, all life is pain, confirmed by the observation that "man is born unto trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward". Since utilitarianism could, arguably, be used to dispose of any group deemed to add to the "pain" side of the scale, that being the only standard of judgement, then people with Down Syndrome cause a lot less pain than many people who Dawkins rubs elbows with at faculty lounges and in the elite circles he frequents. I think there is certainly a utilitarian imperative to empty out the upper eschalons of finance, the military-industrial complex, the sciences and academic fields that service them in their evil doing.... etc. Oddly, I don't ever remember utilitarian analysis being applied to the very classes who invented that stuff on their own class and the class of their sponsors. You almost get the idea that they invented it to be applied only to "the other".
Tell me why I'm wrong based on the reasoning of Richard Dawkins, his admirers and other fans of utilitarian analysis.
Friday, September 26, 2014
Schubert Morgengruss. - Des Müllers Blumen Fritz Wunderlich
It breaks your heart. But this one really does it.
If you can listen to that without a tear coming to your eye you have no heart.
Comment And Answer
This comment was left by mistake on a thread not related to the post it addresses, but it deserves an answer.
siuan sancheSeptember 26, 2014 at 9:13 AM
The idea that Atheism is a maladaptation because we breed less than the religious is completely unscientific, especially when you consider that a lot of religions ban the use of contraception.
Actually, relatively few religions ban the use of contraception and, no matter what the authorities say about it, when they have contraceptives available, members of those religions often use them anyway in the same numbers as people whose religions don't ban their use. Catholics in the United States and in Europe are proof of that in real life, what is supposed to be the real test of scientific ideas.
siuan sancheSeptember 26, 2014 at 9:13 AM
The idea that Atheism is a maladaptation because we breed less than the religious is completely unscientific, especially when you consider that a lot of religions ban the use of contraception.
If you read my post again you'll see that I make a far stronger case to reject the idea that religion is an evolutionary adaptation because the idea makes no sense. It's prominent atheists such as Dawkins and Dennett, Pinker and so many others who insist on that bizarre idea for ideological reasons. Ideological reasons masked in a lab coat, as it were.
Been Under The Weather
hopped up on Benadryl, or dumped down, rather. Here's a rerun until I'm up to writing something new.
The Answer To Political-Ideological Pressure on Textbook Publishers Is To Bypass Them
Ah, the perennial struggle for control of the integrity of Science vs Texas State Textbook Committee is underway again. You can read about that here if you've missedthe earlier rounds that have been pretty much in rerun for decades.
While there might not be a single solution to the problem of right-wing pressure to distort reality in textbooks, effecting the entire country, one is as easy as can be and it would cost little to nothing.
All of the educators and members of university and college faculties who periodically bemoan this have it in their power to create excellent, modern, hyper-text linked, interactive, etc. alternatives to textbooks that could be made available universally a for free online. They could be made so good, so up to date, so well supported that school districts and teachers would want to use them as an alternative to buying expensive, ideologically slanted, soon antiquated paper textbooks. They could then use their textbook budgets to provide tablets or notebook computers to their students who would then never be able to claim they left their textbook at school. Those could be produced by groups of specialists in their fields for free, what Wikipedia should have been but isn't due to its absurd "open editing" that is guaranteed to be as ideologically slanted as anything the most rabidly right-wing party in the struggle for Texas textbook purchasing would love.
So, instead of listening to the tedious whining on the blogs and in the lefty magazines, it's time for these people to put up and put the same kind of effort into a real solution to the problem that they'll put into whining about it. Make it excellent, easy to use, well supported and updated, BRILLIANTLY EDITED and FREE and you can't lose.
While there might not be a single solution to the problem of right-wing pressure to distort reality in textbooks, effecting the entire country, one is as easy as can be and it would cost little to nothing.
All of the educators and members of university and college faculties who periodically bemoan this have it in their power to create excellent, modern, hyper-text linked, interactive, etc. alternatives to textbooks that could be made available universally a for free online. They could be made so good, so up to date, so well supported that school districts and teachers would want to use them as an alternative to buying expensive, ideologically slanted, soon antiquated paper textbooks. They could then use their textbook budgets to provide tablets or notebook computers to their students who would then never be able to claim they left their textbook at school. Those could be produced by groups of specialists in their fields for free, what Wikipedia should have been but isn't due to its absurd "open editing" that is guaranteed to be as ideologically slanted as anything the most rabidly right-wing party in the struggle for Texas textbook purchasing would love.
So, instead of listening to the tedious whining on the blogs and in the lefty magazines, it's time for these people to put up and put the same kind of effort into a real solution to the problem that they'll put into whining about it. Make it excellent, easy to use, well supported and updated, BRILLIANTLY EDITED and FREE and you can't lose.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Schubert Ungeduld Fritz Wunderlich
Fritz Wunderlich, tenor.
Hubert Giesen, piano.
I noticed a German language Youtube that asks if Fritz Wunderlich was not the perfect tenor. I don't know about "the" perfect tenor but he was incredibly good.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Atheism As A Maladaptation: Your Provocative Idea for Tuesday (A day late)
In order to avoid getting stuck in a rut, I like to listen to heretics of many different kinds and yesterday night I listened to one of my favorites, the eminent biologist, eminently mild mannered, reasonable and rational man and widely hated heretic of old-fashioned materialist scientism, Rupert Sheldrake, On Rediscovering God. In the course of the question session, he said something pretty interesting, though not entirely unknown.
Now that I've presented the argument for atheism being maladaptive, certainly a very strong indication that there's something wrong with the idea, it's important to establish that I don't really classify atheism as a biological maladaptation. I have good reasons to believe it isn't, though I don't see how many of the most popular atheists, especially those who work in and around evolutionary biology could hold that it is anything but one. That's especially true of those who have pushed the idea that religious belief is a biological trait, as Sheldrake mentions. Dawkins, Dennett, even a lot of those with an even more tenuous attachment to actual science are the ones who put the question into that rather artificial form of categorization.
Atheism isn't like some genetic illness that leads to people dying before they reach reproductive maturity or reduce reproductive potential. I don't for one second believe that there is any such thing as a genetic foundation for religious belief or a belief in atheism, you can go from one to the other without any mutation in any gene leading to that. Given the somewhat popular line some atheists regurgitate, that all people are born atheists, you would think they could take the tiny intellectual baby step to the conclusion that the fact most people become religious precludes a genetic explanation. Though such a minor intellectual achievement would seem to be beyond the reach of even some of what are generally considered to be among the most sophisticated atheist intellectuals we have around today.
Considering their use of Charles Darwin in their promotional propaganda, it is a rather wonderful irony that their hero also provides the means to identify atheism as a maladaptive habit of thought, one that, if widely adopted, could be expected to lead to the extinction of any group, nation or species which adopted it. As I said I wouldn't do so but, then, I'm rather skeptical about natural selection being a real thing of the type which sets up that form of categorization. I certainly don't see how natural selection can be relevant to the question, though I'd certainly be open to having an explanation of how it could be from someone more competent to do so than Dawkins or Dennett. I'd love to talk to Rupert Sheldrake about that. You're more likely to get a polite and well reasoned explanation of his thoughts on the matter, with little danger of being ridiculed. Ridicule is such a dead give-away of a shaky intellectual position.
In the end it (atheism) is bad for your
health. Studies have shown in the United States that people who have
religious belief or practice live longer and are healthier and
recover from diseases better than those who don't. For white males
it's about five years, for black men it's about fifteen years
extension of life. If any pill were known to do that it would be
hailed as a medical breakthrough.
Given how many atheists get into a lather over anyone who expresses skepticism about even some of the more dangerous and unproven treatments of medical science and how ready they are to slam anyone who is ready to try even the most obviously innocuous practice of alternative medicine, they, themselves, seem to be actively undermining a far more impressively proven health benefit, For many atheists of CSI(COP) and the competition, such as Michael Shirmer, such stuff is a major part of their reason for being .... loud and obnoxiously bossy to people who never asked for them to stick their nose into their business.
And, perhaps in a highly related phenomeon, atheists would seem to embody the very definition of evolutionary maladaptation, leaving fewer offspring than those who believe in God, likely not even achieving replacement levels of reproduction.
It's not only that religious people tend (on average) to have far "more" children than their non-religious peers - it's also about that ominous fact that we do not know about a single non-religious group or population that managed to retain at least the reproductive replacement level for just a century. There have been numerous attempts since Greek and Indian antiquity, not to speak about those late Western cultures and countries - but up to now, there has not been a single demographic success on the communal level.
Now that I've presented the argument for atheism being maladaptive, certainly a very strong indication that there's something wrong with the idea, it's important to establish that I don't really classify atheism as a biological maladaptation. I have good reasons to believe it isn't, though I don't see how many of the most popular atheists, especially those who work in and around evolutionary biology could hold that it is anything but one. That's especially true of those who have pushed the idea that religious belief is a biological trait, as Sheldrake mentions. Dawkins, Dennett, even a lot of those with an even more tenuous attachment to actual science are the ones who put the question into that rather artificial form of categorization.
Atheism isn't like some genetic illness that leads to people dying before they reach reproductive maturity or reduce reproductive potential. I don't for one second believe that there is any such thing as a genetic foundation for religious belief or a belief in atheism, you can go from one to the other without any mutation in any gene leading to that. Given the somewhat popular line some atheists regurgitate, that all people are born atheists, you would think they could take the tiny intellectual baby step to the conclusion that the fact most people become religious precludes a genetic explanation. Though such a minor intellectual achievement would seem to be beyond the reach of even some of what are generally considered to be among the most sophisticated atheist intellectuals we have around today.
Considering their use of Charles Darwin in their promotional propaganda, it is a rather wonderful irony that their hero also provides the means to identify atheism as a maladaptive habit of thought, one that, if widely adopted, could be expected to lead to the extinction of any group, nation or species which adopted it. As I said I wouldn't do so but, then, I'm rather skeptical about natural selection being a real thing of the type which sets up that form of categorization. I certainly don't see how natural selection can be relevant to the question, though I'd certainly be open to having an explanation of how it could be from someone more competent to do so than Dawkins or Dennett. I'd love to talk to Rupert Sheldrake about that. You're more likely to get a polite and well reasoned explanation of his thoughts on the matter, with little danger of being ridiculed. Ridicule is such a dead give-away of a shaky intellectual position.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Debussy Feuilles Mortes For the First Day of Fall Monique Haas
Dead Leaves
Monique Haas is one of my favorite interpreters of the French 20th century repertoire and this is about my favorite of Debussy's Preludes.
Score (page 7)
Habits of Instrumental Thinking The Demise of Liberalism And Establishing Casual Depravity
Perhaps it was his role as one of the more prominent and early of computer scientists which reinforced Joseph Weizenbaum's ability to analyze thinking and action as well as he did, eventually leading him to become an outsider skeptic of the very science and technology he helped create. Or perhaps those habits, already established in him, led him to thinking so clearly about making machines mimic thoughts and actions.
Continuing on with his description of a fatal act of instrumental reasoning, in real life:
The second lesson is this. These men were able to give the counsel they gve because they were operating at an enormous psychological distance from the people who would be maimed and killed by the weapons systems that would result from the ideas they communicated to their sponsors. The lesson, therefore, is that the scientist and technologist must, by acts of will and of imagination, actively strive to reduce such psychological distances, to counter the forces that tend to remove him from the consequences of his actions. He must - it is as simple of this - think of what he is actually doing. He must lear to listen to his own inner voice. He must learn to say no.
This isn't true only of scientists and engineers, it is true of everyone. Those habits of removing yourself from the actual meaning of your words and acts, in real life, are endemic to the human species. I don't know if they are biologically part of our make up, what in this age of cyber-superstition is called our "hard wiring" but if so then it is something we need to fight against if we are to survive as a species and as decent individuals. I think that, in the nearly four decades since Weizenbaum analyzed this summer study group, showing how the processes of thinking learned from science could lead to good intentions turning to massive evil, we've gotten, if anything, far worse at honestly considering the full reality of our thinking.
I can almost guarantee you that if you listen to any of the major networks broadcasting news analysis this morning, even as I'm typing this out, you will be able to identify instrumental reasoning couching calls for far more direct violence and advocacy of terrible things by people regarded as being respectable. It will be in the form of government policy, in actions of world trade and economic institutions, even polices of the UN, advocated in impeccable English by people with degrees from prestigious universities and the most immaculate habits of body and dress but which will knowingly result in the misery and deaths of people, individuals and in their thousands and millions.
And they won't even be required to have motives as elevated as those who invented the electronic battlefield in 1966. They can maintain their status as insiders even if they are explicit in what will result by a mixture of the facade of respectability, credentials given to them by respected educational establishments and the guise of scientific impartiality and cool reason they present their horrific advocacy in. Making their proposed course of action or inaction seem to have the atavistic inevitability as consequences of the workings of the natural world often are the crucial part of selling depravity to even otherwise good people.
That is a habit of thinking that shows how making science into a religion can lead it to the same habits of fatalistic thinking as the old, fatalistic religions. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that so many of those who do turn science into a materialist religion are at odds with, especially, the monotheistic religions which have abandoned that fatalistic assumption for something less likely to produce evil, heightened personal responsibility for our acts and words.
Weizenbaum concludes his analysis of the summer study group:
Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, on e that many of the university's students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the worlds: "We could have taken a oral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.
I am aware, of course, that hardly anyone who reads these lines will feel himself addressed by them - so deep has the conviction that we are all governed by anonymous forces beyond our control penetrated into the shared consciousness of our time. And accompanying this conviction is the debasement of the idea of civil courage.
It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by the petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of or mundane existence.
In the dozen or fifteen years that I have read the unedited words of many, many thousands of people who assume positions on the left than I'd ever have met and heard in real life before the internet, I've come to see look at the problems with the thinking that has caused the eclipse of liberalism and democracy in the United States, of what led to our exile, going on ten years longer than that Moses led the Hebrews on in The Book of Exodus.
I have concluded that, especially in those with some academic or professional standing to protect, this kind of thinking, these habits of thought are one of the most insidious and potent destroyers of what must be, at its foundations, a program of rigorous idealism and selfless action. This kind of impersonal, would-be scientific thinking can analyze away all of those things quite efficiently, leaving the neo-liberalism that is currently the preferred mode of coolitude in this present administration of our most nearly geek president. One whose presidency has been mostly a failure in terms of liberalism and which, I am sorry to say, seems to be being forced by events and its own desire to remain on as insiders to recapitulate the destruction of the liberal intentions of the administration in 1966.
It was The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. who pointed out that the country would never be able to achieve Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and his other great efforts in harnessing the law of the most powerful country on Earth to produce justice, a better life and a future if it became mired in the war in Viet Nam. The next nine years of that war, the destruction of Johnson's administration leading to the lying Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and the rest of his administration, who conspired to use the war to gain power marked the real end of that effort to continue the work of our last real liberal president, Franklin Roosevelt.
Continuing on with his description of a fatal act of instrumental reasoning, in real life:
The second lesson is this. These men were able to give the counsel they gve because they were operating at an enormous psychological distance from the people who would be maimed and killed by the weapons systems that would result from the ideas they communicated to their sponsors. The lesson, therefore, is that the scientist and technologist must, by acts of will and of imagination, actively strive to reduce such psychological distances, to counter the forces that tend to remove him from the consequences of his actions. He must - it is as simple of this - think of what he is actually doing. He must lear to listen to his own inner voice. He must learn to say no.
This isn't true only of scientists and engineers, it is true of everyone. Those habits of removing yourself from the actual meaning of your words and acts, in real life, are endemic to the human species. I don't know if they are biologically part of our make up, what in this age of cyber-superstition is called our "hard wiring" but if so then it is something we need to fight against if we are to survive as a species and as decent individuals. I think that, in the nearly four decades since Weizenbaum analyzed this summer study group, showing how the processes of thinking learned from science could lead to good intentions turning to massive evil, we've gotten, if anything, far worse at honestly considering the full reality of our thinking.
I can almost guarantee you that if you listen to any of the major networks broadcasting news analysis this morning, even as I'm typing this out, you will be able to identify instrumental reasoning couching calls for far more direct violence and advocacy of terrible things by people regarded as being respectable. It will be in the form of government policy, in actions of world trade and economic institutions, even polices of the UN, advocated in impeccable English by people with degrees from prestigious universities and the most immaculate habits of body and dress but which will knowingly result in the misery and deaths of people, individuals and in their thousands and millions.
And they won't even be required to have motives as elevated as those who invented the electronic battlefield in 1966. They can maintain their status as insiders even if they are explicit in what will result by a mixture of the facade of respectability, credentials given to them by respected educational establishments and the guise of scientific impartiality and cool reason they present their horrific advocacy in. Making their proposed course of action or inaction seem to have the atavistic inevitability as consequences of the workings of the natural world often are the crucial part of selling depravity to even otherwise good people.
That is a habit of thinking that shows how making science into a religion can lead it to the same habits of fatalistic thinking as the old, fatalistic religions. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that so many of those who do turn science into a materialist religion are at odds with, especially, the monotheistic religions which have abandoned that fatalistic assumption for something less likely to produce evil, heightened personal responsibility for our acts and words.
Weizenbaum concludes his analysis of the summer study group:
Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, on e that many of the university's students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the worlds: "We could have taken a oral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.
I am aware, of course, that hardly anyone who reads these lines will feel himself addressed by them - so deep has the conviction that we are all governed by anonymous forces beyond our control penetrated into the shared consciousness of our time. And accompanying this conviction is the debasement of the idea of civil courage.
It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by the petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of or mundane existence.
In the dozen or fifteen years that I have read the unedited words of many, many thousands of people who assume positions on the left than I'd ever have met and heard in real life before the internet, I've come to see look at the problems with the thinking that has caused the eclipse of liberalism and democracy in the United States, of what led to our exile, going on ten years longer than that Moses led the Hebrews on in The Book of Exodus.
I have concluded that, especially in those with some academic or professional standing to protect, this kind of thinking, these habits of thought are one of the most insidious and potent destroyers of what must be, at its foundations, a program of rigorous idealism and selfless action. This kind of impersonal, would-be scientific thinking can analyze away all of those things quite efficiently, leaving the neo-liberalism that is currently the preferred mode of coolitude in this present administration of our most nearly geek president. One whose presidency has been mostly a failure in terms of liberalism and which, I am sorry to say, seems to be being forced by events and its own desire to remain on as insiders to recapitulate the destruction of the liberal intentions of the administration in 1966.
It was The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. who pointed out that the country would never be able to achieve Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and his other great efforts in harnessing the law of the most powerful country on Earth to produce justice, a better life and a future if it became mired in the war in Viet Nam. The next nine years of that war, the destruction of Johnson's administration leading to the lying Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and the rest of his administration, who conspired to use the war to gain power marked the real end of that effort to continue the work of our last real liberal president, Franklin Roosevelt.
Monday, September 22, 2014
The Genesis of Routine Evil Is Often In Instrumental Reasoning
In his book, The Malaise of Modernity, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor said:
Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness and well-being of individuals as our goal. The yardstick that henceforth applies is that of instrumental reason.
Which is the most optimistic thing that can be said about it. In reality, when society has lost a sense of the sacred, of God, the imperative of individuals with more power and greater abilities will devise methods of finding optimal gratification for themselves and to set up structures which will bend other individuals to their purpose. And some of those whose evil is, though less dramatic, no less apart of the greater evil protect far lesser levels of power and affluence, including that attainable through an academic career. It can even be true of institutions that officially stand against the very acts they end up supporting. You can see that in a very developed form in the British class system, which incorporated the nominally Christian established church within its aristocracy and so bent what most people experience as "the will of God" to its entirely Mammonist ends.*
How otherwise good people come to do bad things has to be understood if there is any hope of doing better. Especially important is for them to understand what their real motives are and that they don't tell themselves lies of convenience about those and what they do. A lot of evil is done with the doer playing the role of passive observer, even as they act in real life.
One of the things that isn't talked about anywhere often enough is the destructive force of instrumental reasoning, the default habit of thought that pervades modern culture, thinking that is derived from the methods of science and which, in the disasters that result from it, show how dangerous that can be when applied generally. This is among the most forbidden, criminal of all thoughts in the thinking class, today. It has been criminal thinking for a long, long time, especially among The English Speaking People.
I will start with a passage from the greatly neglected book, Computer Power And Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum.
It is hard, when one sees a particularly offensive television commercial, to imagine that adult human beings sometime and somewhere sat around a table and decided to construct exactly that commercial and to have it broadcast hundreds of times. But that is what happens. These things are not products of anonymous forces. They are the products of groups of men who have agreed among themselves that this pollution of the consciousness of the people serves their purposes.
But, as has been true since the beginning of recorded history, decisions having the most evil consequences are often made in the service of some overriding good. For example, in the summer of 1966 there was considerable agitation in the United States over America's intensive bombing of North Viet Nam. (The destruction rained on South Viet Nam by American bombers was less of an issue in the public debate, because the public was still persuaded that America was "helping" that unfortunate land.) Approximately forty American scientists who were high in the scientific estate decided to help stop the bombing by convening a summer study group under the auspices of the Institute of Defense Analyses, a prestigious consulting firm for the Department of Defense. They intended to demonstrate that the bombing was in fact ineffective.
They made their demonstration using the best scientific tools, operations research and systems analysis and all that. But they felt they would not be heard by the Secretary of Defense unless they suggested an alternative to the bombing. They proposed that an "electronic fence" be placed in the so-called demilitarized zone separating South from North Viet Nam. This barrier was supposed to stop infiltrators from the North. It was to consist of, among other devices, small mines seeded into the earth, and specifically designed to blow off porters' feet but to be insensitive to truck passing over them. Other devices were to interdict truck traffic. The various electronic sensors, their monitors, and so on, eventually became part of the so-called McNamara line. This was the beginning of what has since developed into the concept of the electronic battlefield.
The intention of most of these men was not to invent or recommend a new technology that would make warfare more terrible and, by the way, less costly to highly industrialized nations at the expense of "undeveloped" ones. Their intention was to stop the bombing. In this they were wholly on the side of the peace groups and of well-meaning citizens generally. And they actually accomplished their objective; the bombing of North Viet Nam was stopped for a time and the McNamara fence was installed. However, these enormously visible and influential people could have instead simply announced that they believed the bombing, indeed the whole American Viet Nam adventure, to be wrong, and that they would no longer "help." I know that at least some of the participants believes that the war was wrong; perhaps all of them did. But, as some of them explained to me later, they felt that if they made such an announcement, they would not be listened to, then or ever again. Yet, who can tell what effect it would have had if forty of America's leading scientists had, in the summer of 1966, joined the peace groups in coming out flatly against the war on moral grounds? Apart form the positive effect such a move might have had on world events, what negative effect did their compromise have on themselves and on their colleagues and students for whom they served as examples?
There are several lessons to be learned from this episode. The first is that it was not technological inevitability that invented the electronic battlefield, nor was it a set of anonymous forces. men just like the ones who design television commercials sat around a table and chose. Yet the outcome of the debates of the 1966 Summer Study were in a sense foreordained. The range of answers one gets is determined by the domain of questions one asks. As soon as it was settled that the Summer Study was to concern itself with only technical questions, the solution to the problem of stopping the bombing of the North became essentially a matter of calculation. When the side condition was added that the group must at all costs maintain its credibility with its sponsors, that it must not imperil the participants' "insider" status, then all degrees of freedom that its members might have had initially were effectively lost. Many of the participants have, I know, defended academic freedom, their own as well as that of of colleagues whose careers were in jeopardy for political reasons. These men did not perceive themselves to be risking their scholarly or academic freedoms when they engaged in the kind of consulting characterized by the Summer Study. But the sacrifice of the degrees of freedom they might have had if they had not so thoroughly abandoned themselves to their sponsors, whether they made that sacrifice unwittingly or not, was a more potent form of censorship than any that could possibly have been imposed by officials of the state. This kind of intellectual self-mutilation, precisely because it is largely unconscious, is a principal source of the feeling of powerlessness experienced by so many people who appear, superficially at least, to occupy seats of power.
I will continue with his text, tomorrow.
It is appropriate that Weizenbaum began with an example from the media, which the advertising industry is. I would argue that since all media, even the alleged "public" media and even those like the BBC, Deutsche Welle and others is first interested in the perpetuation and expansion of the institution, its funding source is the real determining force in how things are said, what is said and which determines the objective of its message. The participants in the summer study group allowed their considerations and conclusions to be determined by their desire to protect their status with their funders and sponsors, their vehicle to attain status as "insiders" and the entire media, especially that based in Washington DC, New York city and other centers of establishment power, have that as their real, first imperative. You can safely conclude what the perceived boundaries of permitted thought are by seeing what is said in the most prestigious media organizations and how it is said.
As Weizenbaum continued with the work of scientists, applying scientific methods and thinking - the embodiment of instrumental reasoning at its most intentional and in its most embodied form - can be at service to evil and the virtue that scientific method and thinking is reputed to be can blind even the most intelligent people to what they are really doing. Their chosen method carries an imperative force that they feel must be "allowed" to reach its end, allowing them to pretend that they aren't the authors of whatever that is, shielding them from the reality that any evil results of it are the product of their choices and their actions. The pretense that the acts of choice they make are the results of atavistic forces outside of their control is enabled by the scientific trappings in which they dress them. This shows how they, with the best of intentions, allow the prestige of science and academia to mask what they are really doing from themselves. They postpone the moment of moral choice into some never to come future in order to serve other ends that they don't admit to.
The role that science has played in almost all of the greatest acts of evil in the modern period is not much different in motive from that which is attributable to religious establishments. Even the accurate history of religion in the world - as opposed to that promoted by atheists, which is frequently about as accurate as the National Enquirer - is a record of far too many evil acts that violate the official moral stands of those religions. Only, as the real religion of the political and economic (and so academic and media) establishment today, second only to money in its pious regard, the buffer between what is supposed to be and what actually is, remains in place. That is especially dangerous when it is science that is the method of permitting evil because of the physical efficacy that science can have. Science, from its beginnings and its first glimmerings in revered figures such as Archimedes made itself of use to worldy powers in their military manifestation. To deny that is even more dangerous than it is to lie about the results of religious figures setting up kingdoms of this world. The evil that a TV preacher can do is seldom more than contained in a small sphere of influence. At worst, science can unleash physical forces that could kill us all. It is one of the most telling facts about today's intellectual climate that the fact that science, existing only in the minds of scientists, has, knowingly put us all at risk of annihilation from nuclear weapons at each and every hour since they weaponized missiles, with the full knowledge of what those can do. The scientists who did that knew exactly what they were doing, they even calculated the number of people that any one bomb could be expected to kill. They made themselves part of the military machine of mass death with the full knowledge of what they were doing, they are the ones who told the generals and politicians what they could build them. Understanding how they did what they did, how they chose to become the engine that could drive us to planetary murder -suicide is one of the most important questions to ask. It can be asked of the science that ends in environmental disasters such as BP created in the Gulf of Mexico and so many others. Bringing that up is a crime of thought in our general culture, it is heresy to point these things out. It is especially forbidden to suggest that science and its methods, themselves, are what dictated the acts of science which is, by choice, removed from the moral choices that separate decent people from evil ones.
* Which might account for why, especially in Britain, religion has been so thoroughly discredited and why in the - formerly less class bound - United States religion retains more credibility. I think it also has something to do with the class based campaigning by those who want to discredit religion, making it declasse, literally. It is one of their most typical methods, to associate all of religion with lower class people in rural areas.
I would never say that there that there are not and have never been even members of the Anglican clergy who have tried to actually follow the teachings of Jesus and the prophets, though, as with some of the various Orthodox traditions, having a church established in such close connection to the government and ruling class of a country has proved to be a notable hindrance to avoiding the evil that is intrinsic to kingdoms of this world and, on some occasions, participating in its creation. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has never been more discredited than when it has either done the same thing or acted as a worldly kingdom in violation of the words of the man it holds is divine.
Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness and well-being of individuals as our goal. The yardstick that henceforth applies is that of instrumental reason.
Which is the most optimistic thing that can be said about it. In reality, when society has lost a sense of the sacred, of God, the imperative of individuals with more power and greater abilities will devise methods of finding optimal gratification for themselves and to set up structures which will bend other individuals to their purpose. And some of those whose evil is, though less dramatic, no less apart of the greater evil protect far lesser levels of power and affluence, including that attainable through an academic career. It can even be true of institutions that officially stand against the very acts they end up supporting. You can see that in a very developed form in the British class system, which incorporated the nominally Christian established church within its aristocracy and so bent what most people experience as "the will of God" to its entirely Mammonist ends.*
How otherwise good people come to do bad things has to be understood if there is any hope of doing better. Especially important is for them to understand what their real motives are and that they don't tell themselves lies of convenience about those and what they do. A lot of evil is done with the doer playing the role of passive observer, even as they act in real life.
One of the things that isn't talked about anywhere often enough is the destructive force of instrumental reasoning, the default habit of thought that pervades modern culture, thinking that is derived from the methods of science and which, in the disasters that result from it, show how dangerous that can be when applied generally. This is among the most forbidden, criminal of all thoughts in the thinking class, today. It has been criminal thinking for a long, long time, especially among The English Speaking People.
I will start with a passage from the greatly neglected book, Computer Power And Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum.
It is hard, when one sees a particularly offensive television commercial, to imagine that adult human beings sometime and somewhere sat around a table and decided to construct exactly that commercial and to have it broadcast hundreds of times. But that is what happens. These things are not products of anonymous forces. They are the products of groups of men who have agreed among themselves that this pollution of the consciousness of the people serves their purposes.
But, as has been true since the beginning of recorded history, decisions having the most evil consequences are often made in the service of some overriding good. For example, in the summer of 1966 there was considerable agitation in the United States over America's intensive bombing of North Viet Nam. (The destruction rained on South Viet Nam by American bombers was less of an issue in the public debate, because the public was still persuaded that America was "helping" that unfortunate land.) Approximately forty American scientists who were high in the scientific estate decided to help stop the bombing by convening a summer study group under the auspices of the Institute of Defense Analyses, a prestigious consulting firm for the Department of Defense. They intended to demonstrate that the bombing was in fact ineffective.
They made their demonstration using the best scientific tools, operations research and systems analysis and all that. But they felt they would not be heard by the Secretary of Defense unless they suggested an alternative to the bombing. They proposed that an "electronic fence" be placed in the so-called demilitarized zone separating South from North Viet Nam. This barrier was supposed to stop infiltrators from the North. It was to consist of, among other devices, small mines seeded into the earth, and specifically designed to blow off porters' feet but to be insensitive to truck passing over them. Other devices were to interdict truck traffic. The various electronic sensors, their monitors, and so on, eventually became part of the so-called McNamara line. This was the beginning of what has since developed into the concept of the electronic battlefield.
The intention of most of these men was not to invent or recommend a new technology that would make warfare more terrible and, by the way, less costly to highly industrialized nations at the expense of "undeveloped" ones. Their intention was to stop the bombing. In this they were wholly on the side of the peace groups and of well-meaning citizens generally. And they actually accomplished their objective; the bombing of North Viet Nam was stopped for a time and the McNamara fence was installed. However, these enormously visible and influential people could have instead simply announced that they believed the bombing, indeed the whole American Viet Nam adventure, to be wrong, and that they would no longer "help." I know that at least some of the participants believes that the war was wrong; perhaps all of them did. But, as some of them explained to me later, they felt that if they made such an announcement, they would not be listened to, then or ever again. Yet, who can tell what effect it would have had if forty of America's leading scientists had, in the summer of 1966, joined the peace groups in coming out flatly against the war on moral grounds? Apart form the positive effect such a move might have had on world events, what negative effect did their compromise have on themselves and on their colleagues and students for whom they served as examples?
There are several lessons to be learned from this episode. The first is that it was not technological inevitability that invented the electronic battlefield, nor was it a set of anonymous forces. men just like the ones who design television commercials sat around a table and chose. Yet the outcome of the debates of the 1966 Summer Study were in a sense foreordained. The range of answers one gets is determined by the domain of questions one asks. As soon as it was settled that the Summer Study was to concern itself with only technical questions, the solution to the problem of stopping the bombing of the North became essentially a matter of calculation. When the side condition was added that the group must at all costs maintain its credibility with its sponsors, that it must not imperil the participants' "insider" status, then all degrees of freedom that its members might have had initially were effectively lost. Many of the participants have, I know, defended academic freedom, their own as well as that of of colleagues whose careers were in jeopardy for political reasons. These men did not perceive themselves to be risking their scholarly or academic freedoms when they engaged in the kind of consulting characterized by the Summer Study. But the sacrifice of the degrees of freedom they might have had if they had not so thoroughly abandoned themselves to their sponsors, whether they made that sacrifice unwittingly or not, was a more potent form of censorship than any that could possibly have been imposed by officials of the state. This kind of intellectual self-mutilation, precisely because it is largely unconscious, is a principal source of the feeling of powerlessness experienced by so many people who appear, superficially at least, to occupy seats of power.
I will continue with his text, tomorrow.
It is appropriate that Weizenbaum began with an example from the media, which the advertising industry is. I would argue that since all media, even the alleged "public" media and even those like the BBC, Deutsche Welle and others is first interested in the perpetuation and expansion of the institution, its funding source is the real determining force in how things are said, what is said and which determines the objective of its message. The participants in the summer study group allowed their considerations and conclusions to be determined by their desire to protect their status with their funders and sponsors, their vehicle to attain status as "insiders" and the entire media, especially that based in Washington DC, New York city and other centers of establishment power, have that as their real, first imperative. You can safely conclude what the perceived boundaries of permitted thought are by seeing what is said in the most prestigious media organizations and how it is said.
As Weizenbaum continued with the work of scientists, applying scientific methods and thinking - the embodiment of instrumental reasoning at its most intentional and in its most embodied form - can be at service to evil and the virtue that scientific method and thinking is reputed to be can blind even the most intelligent people to what they are really doing. Their chosen method carries an imperative force that they feel must be "allowed" to reach its end, allowing them to pretend that they aren't the authors of whatever that is, shielding them from the reality that any evil results of it are the product of their choices and their actions. The pretense that the acts of choice they make are the results of atavistic forces outside of their control is enabled by the scientific trappings in which they dress them. This shows how they, with the best of intentions, allow the prestige of science and academia to mask what they are really doing from themselves. They postpone the moment of moral choice into some never to come future in order to serve other ends that they don't admit to.
The role that science has played in almost all of the greatest acts of evil in the modern period is not much different in motive from that which is attributable to religious establishments. Even the accurate history of religion in the world - as opposed to that promoted by atheists, which is frequently about as accurate as the National Enquirer - is a record of far too many evil acts that violate the official moral stands of those religions. Only, as the real religion of the political and economic (and so academic and media) establishment today, second only to money in its pious regard, the buffer between what is supposed to be and what actually is, remains in place. That is especially dangerous when it is science that is the method of permitting evil because of the physical efficacy that science can have. Science, from its beginnings and its first glimmerings in revered figures such as Archimedes made itself of use to worldy powers in their military manifestation. To deny that is even more dangerous than it is to lie about the results of religious figures setting up kingdoms of this world. The evil that a TV preacher can do is seldom more than contained in a small sphere of influence. At worst, science can unleash physical forces that could kill us all. It is one of the most telling facts about today's intellectual climate that the fact that science, existing only in the minds of scientists, has, knowingly put us all at risk of annihilation from nuclear weapons at each and every hour since they weaponized missiles, with the full knowledge of what those can do. The scientists who did that knew exactly what they were doing, they even calculated the number of people that any one bomb could be expected to kill. They made themselves part of the military machine of mass death with the full knowledge of what they were doing, they are the ones who told the generals and politicians what they could build them. Understanding how they did what they did, how they chose to become the engine that could drive us to planetary murder -suicide is one of the most important questions to ask. It can be asked of the science that ends in environmental disasters such as BP created in the Gulf of Mexico and so many others. Bringing that up is a crime of thought in our general culture, it is heresy to point these things out. It is especially forbidden to suggest that science and its methods, themselves, are what dictated the acts of science which is, by choice, removed from the moral choices that separate decent people from evil ones.
* Which might account for why, especially in Britain, religion has been so thoroughly discredited and why in the - formerly less class bound - United States religion retains more credibility. I think it also has something to do with the class based campaigning by those who want to discredit religion, making it declasse, literally. It is one of their most typical methods, to associate all of religion with lower class people in rural areas.
I would never say that there that there are not and have never been even members of the Anglican clergy who have tried to actually follow the teachings of Jesus and the prophets, though, as with some of the various Orthodox traditions, having a church established in such close connection to the government and ruling class of a country has proved to be a notable hindrance to avoiding the evil that is intrinsic to kingdoms of this world and, on some occasions, participating in its creation. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has never been more discredited than when it has either done the same thing or acted as a worldly kingdom in violation of the words of the man it holds is divine.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Unselfishness Is How To Break Out Of The Mental Corset of Fashion
Here is a very rare thing in the American media, a serious discussion of the place that the recently fashionable nihilism has in history. In the segment from the program, On The Media, Brooke Gladstone, Jad Abumrad and Eugene Thacker are those who are in the discussion. I don't know which of the men's voices belong to who, since I don't listen to the Radio Lab program one of them hosts. If I had the time, I'd type out passages of the recording to address and discuss, but I can expand on my comment at the On The Media website.
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There is an alternative to the dichotomy this otherwise good piece presents. In the point when one of the men talking brings up The Decameron and the plague literature he says that the alternatives presented are 1. to seal yourself up (often in pleasant surroundings) to wait out the plague or, 2. to go to church and pray. He left out the alternative of putting yourself at risk to take care of those who are sick and dying, putting yourself at risk of dying while, at the same time, embodying the highest and greatest form of human life, someone who risks everything to take care of other people, the same thing that the medical missionaries and Doctors Without Borders are doing today in West Africa and elsewhere.
Leaving that out isn't surprising in a discussion among members of today's thinking class, even those of good will, because there is nothing more unfashionable in this or in any other age with members of any leisure class, the kind who generally write books and work in the media. They may admire the examples of such people but they don't take their far more impressive actions seriously as compared to the words that "fork no lightning" of their fellow members of the educated class, the kind who review things, write criticism and who they are more likely to meet at a faculty meeting or a bar that caters to the class of people who work in the media. That the actions, instead of words, of people who put themselves at risk of dying, might contain something worth thinking about at least as seriously as the Dada Manifesto is may, perhaps, be due to the danger that you might feel morally bound to do something instead of talking about it and publishing about it.
It is in that lazy lassitude of the leisure class that I see nihilism at its most welcoming home. It has infected what used to be the liberalism of the West that produced the abolition movement, the woman's suffrage and equality struggle and all other civil rights movements. It is the death of any kind of progress, any kind of freedom because it is a comfortable denial of the reality of any of those things by people whose highest values are their own convenience and comfort.
Don't get me wrong, it's great to have somewhere on the radio where one still occasionally hears serious things being discussed. I would, though, encourage Brooke Gladstone to consider that in all of those instances of nihilism she discussed, it was members of upper economic classes finding that their expectations their values led to a dead end in a spiritual wasteland. Even Ecclesiastes, which shows that even members of the clergy who take that route end up spiritually empty, cynical and desolate.
Nihilism is both a luxury of the rich, or at least those who don't have to struggle for a living for themselves and those they come closest to loving and the product of their affluence. Its opposite can be found in James Cone, the liberation theologians - black, Latino and others. It can be found in the, frankly, religious struggle for justice, something which nihilists, at bottom, deny exists.
Generosity, kindness, and unselfish love are things that exist outside of the bump and grind of fashion. While they are ridiculed by the fashionably cynical and nihilistic and talking about them or even in terms of them have been made to feel embarrassingly out of style, "kumbaya moments" when you are the recipient of them, you don't ever find them so. Though the selfish will not appreciate their value when other people are the beneficiaries - in this we see the difference between conservatives and liberals.
Those things are not the product of the system which is, clearly, the only one considered in almost all of academic life and the media produced by those correctly fitted with a mental corset by their educations and acculturation into the milieu of the ascendant class. I would think that pretty much no one got those from their strictly academic courses. Their demotion is only furthered by their association with various religious traditions whose serious adherence in terms of economics and class are, as well, not welcomed by the economic elite and its clerks and praise singers in the media and academic life.
I haven't seen any other escape from either the stifling program of the materialist "enlightenment" or its destructive twin, nihilism, the two of which embody that rather dubious project of the intellectual class, modernism. The fact is that in each and every period which Brooke Gladstone rather well brings up to demonstrate the existence of nihilism throughout human history, the alternative of unselfish generosity, self sacrifice for the possible good of others, has been a real and active alternative, one which has never grown old.
The political problem of that is, as Jesus envisioned in The Kingdom of God and The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. did in The Beloved Community, making it more general and the common experience of life. Which is something all other systems and habits of thought seem to do anything to suppress. If that is not the goal of American style liberalism, it is liberalism that is dead, not God. The alternative is dead to life and will lead to nothing but death, the deaths of individuals and, eventually, us all.
Friday, September 19, 2014
Threshing Beans
Thursday, September 18, 2014
I Read My E-Mail
There is a simple fact of life that nothing an atheist says about the various parables of the First Testament is nearly as interesting as what a scholar of that book says about it. So, I pass on the ignorant comments at Baby Blue you gave me a heads-up on.
Update: Of special interest to NTodd, re his comment and which may have all of us looking more carefully at ingredient lists for a while to come.
Update: Of special interest to NTodd, re his comment and which may have all of us looking more carefully at ingredient lists for a while to come.
Owning Adulthood 2
Continuing on with the question of adults making choices and living with the full results of them.
You either get to stand by your word or you abandon your claims to the right to have other people take you at your word. You can have your "yes" mean yes" and not later claim that you get to make it mean "no" when it suits you or you will encourage a system in which people can claim to believe that your "no" means "yes." If that latter alternative sounds familiar, it has been a slogan used by rapists for decades. It featured in that infamous chant by Yale frat boys that made the news a few years ago. There is no other acceptable standard that adults must be held to. They must be required to respect what other adults say and that the words "yes" and "no" mean what they mean. That won't turn out to be a one sided contract, it must hold for both parties and both words or it invites that kind of muddled thinking and the opportunities that the more powerful or privileged party can make of the resulting ambiguity. Certainly the law won't work in a system when yes can mean no any better than a system in which no can be claimed to mean yes.
It was one of the main goals of feminism, from the beginning, that women have equal rights to make contracts and decisions that were as legally binding as those of men. In the past it was the legal policy in many places that men had to do those things in the names of women because women were biologically incapable of making those choices and contracts on a reliable basis. As recently as the 1960s, it was often impossible for women to get insurance without having a man sign for them. It is one of the most appalling things in this argument that people calling themselves feminists are insisting, essentially, that those anti-feminist men were right and that women have a right to not be believed when they say "yes".
That adults have to have these things pointed out to them is a real scandal. That the supposed intellectual class that college and university students are alleged to be needs to have them pointed out to them leads me to think that the age of adulthood is probably set far too low, in too many cases. It isn't merely a situation that applies to women, there has been a general infantalization of the culture in the past few decades, under the influence of commercial media. If the puerile antics of ivy league frat boys didn't lead to that conclusion the claims of those who push the idea that adults who have given consent to sex can, even days or weeks later, decide that their unsuspecting partner raped them, confirms that the childishness isn't restricted to the frat boys.
It is simply and plainly unrealistic to think that universities can both treat their students as adults, respecting their ability to make their own choices and also to protect those adults from their bad choices, especially those made in private, without any witnesses to corroborate the claims of one side or the other when disputed claims are made. Since almost all college students are legally adults, universities can't be forced to both treat them as if they were minor children, on the one hand and full adults possessing the full right and responsibilities of adulthood. Even insisting on them doing both at the same time won't make that possible and that is exactly what is being demanded of them in this case.
That is especially true when it is a question of rape among adults, when the existence of a crime hinges on consent being given or the request to have sex refused, something that generally happens in private, without witnesses.
It is a right of adults to consent or reject to have sex and the crime of rape hinges on the question of consent and unless that is in writing, in a form which can be used as evidence, that will always depend on whether or not one or the other is believed. That it is unsexy as hell to turn consent, each and every time, into a written contract would make the suggestion of it absurd. But if one party can claim to not believe the verbal assent or refusal of the other or claim that they get a right to change the meaning of their "yes" to "no" after the fact, the only way to avoid claims of rape is to write it out, every time. The fact that consent to having sex is often implied by the absence of an explicit if not forceful refusal, and that, in many cases going back to someone's room or car can imply consent and is often understood as consent makes it especially important that no claims that the words "yes" and "no" do not have have real, binding and final meaning are made or tolerated by rational adults.
The sexist ambient culture in which women live being what it is, it is in the interest of everyone that ambiguities be eliminated, not claimed as some kind of expression of freedom and, irrationally, adulthood.
It is important to remember that in this post I'm addressing only the matter of rape of rational adults, not of minor children and adults who are intellectually unable to give legal consent. The issues and rational conclusions about sexual abuse of those people is a far different and far less ambiguous matter, something that is often forgotten in the general smokescreen raised around the issue of sex and rights.
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Mixing in intoxication doesn't help at all. There is a reason that alcohol was used as the original date rape drug, it impairs judgment and leads people to do things that they, sober, would not do. It is often easier to talk a drunk person into doing things that they will later regret. It is easier to get a drunk person to surrender their money than a sober one, one of the reasons that casinos keep the drinks flowing. And it is often easier for an objectionable sex partner to get consent from someone who is drunk.* There is a term for that and it isn't rape, it is "I got drunk and made a fool of myself" or "I got drunk and he/she made a fool of me". There is a difference between being made a fool, especially by yourself, and being the victim of a crime.
Which is different from rape, non-consensual sex, which is often a result of one or both parties being drunk. Like it or not, someone who gets very drunk and passes out has made themselves more vulnerable to being raped. A child has the excuse of being a child with the presumed lack of understanding and judgement and experience with alcohol. an excuse which is essential to their right to enhanced levels of protection due to their lack of maturity. An adult will find it far harder to escape the expectation that they should have known the possible consequences of getting drunk, especially in a milieu which places them in greater danger of being attacked. There is no argument that will keep that question out of peoples' minds in judging an attack made on someone who has voluntarily done to themselves what a creep who slips them a drug does to them involuntarily. To pretend that even judges instructing juries or prosecutors deciding which cases are realistically prosecuted can change that fact is, as well, demanding the impossible. People are not going to ignore the acts of even credible victims helping set up the scenario in which they were attacked. If they were predisposed to believe the accused the choice of the accuser to be drunk will provide them with an excuse to not believe the accusation.
There is nothing feminist about denying reality. There is nothing liberating about denying reality. There is nothing feminist about pretending that the impossible is possible or pretending to have achieved that impossible condition is likely to lead to better results. That currently sold model of feminism, in which women act as frat boys and Hollywood producers want them to, pretending that the choice to act that way isn't the product of thorough training and indoctrination by the media does nothing to enhance the conditions women live in. The currently sold brand of feminism is a huge step backwards. Programs like "Friends" on the less damaging end of things, in a million ads and commercials in the middle and in even mainstream movies on the worst, all teach women the worst ideas that Betty Friedan pointed out oppressed women a half a century ago. Minus the house work, perhaps. June Cleaver's house work in high heels is about the only thing missing. But I'm only going to deal with one part of that program of self-imposed backlash.
There is nothing liberating about getting drunk, suspending judgment, impairing an ability to watch out for yourself and, in the event of an attack, to defend yourself. Getting drunk turns an adult into a vulnerable child who is more easily taken advantage of by people who want to do that and of making choices they would not have made, sober. Taking one drink and keeping your adult abilities intact is one thing, getting drunk to the point where you lose those is entirely different. Getting drunk is an escape from adult responsibilities and it carries a loss of the ability to exercise rights. There is no way that a university or even the judicial system can step in and do for an adult what they claim is their sole responsibility to do. There is nothing that enhances the rights of women in insisting that isn't the case, attempting to claim, both. To insist on a right to that an unnamed form of in loco parentis while objecting to it as being patronizing is to insist on having a right to both of two opposing alternatives at the same time. Insisting on that impossible condition does nothing to enhance the standing of feminism as a serious movement that serious people have a moral obligation to take seriously.
The currently unfashionable "second-wave" feminism was such a movement. That is the reason it was the target of the media and political backlash that includes "third-wave" "feminism". It was a movement by serious women who demanded their full rights including that the aspects of culture that oppressed them had to be changed. That it was women who were demanding their rights, issues of sex were central to that and that impinged on what people found sexually stimulating, in all too many ways based in differential levels of power and status**. In all too many cases, the culture has reinforced those to sell people on things through what they were accustomed to finding sexually appealing, including aspects of that which are oppressive. The old ideas about women and men were oppressive, the idea that there were major intellectual and mental differences between men and women were used to oppress women. There is no way to retain the belief in those differences, to have them embedded in the culture and in the law and to achieve full equality. Yet that is exactly what the currently fashionable thing that has hijacked the word "feminism" insists on doing. It won't happen, no matter how many times you insist that it will.
* Back in the 1970s, in response to the inevitable problems of having gay life so tied up in bars, there was an all too minor and all too short lived sobriety effort among gay folk. Part of the problem was people waking up to find that they'd agreed to have sex with someone they really didn't want to or in ways they would rather not have or should not have often consenting to it. Getting drunk while gay was not liberating, it wasn't positive, it wasn't good, it created problems and, in a lot of cases, destroyed lives.
I've come to think that the current model of feminism creates, in some ways, a situation similar to that which gay men experienced in the run up to AIDS, in which the most irresponsible and puerile behavior was sold as liberating and celebrated as such. Biology, hard truth, reality shows that isn't sustainable and the results are not liberating. Not even on a rather short term.
** Another similarity with the struggle for gay rights and the fact that gay men are often their own worst oppressors through the sexualization of inequality.
You either get to stand by your word or you abandon your claims to the right to have other people take you at your word. You can have your "yes" mean yes" and not later claim that you get to make it mean "no" when it suits you or you will encourage a system in which people can claim to believe that your "no" means "yes." If that latter alternative sounds familiar, it has been a slogan used by rapists for decades. It featured in that infamous chant by Yale frat boys that made the news a few years ago. There is no other acceptable standard that adults must be held to. They must be required to respect what other adults say and that the words "yes" and "no" mean what they mean. That won't turn out to be a one sided contract, it must hold for both parties and both words or it invites that kind of muddled thinking and the opportunities that the more powerful or privileged party can make of the resulting ambiguity. Certainly the law won't work in a system when yes can mean no any better than a system in which no can be claimed to mean yes.
It was one of the main goals of feminism, from the beginning, that women have equal rights to make contracts and decisions that were as legally binding as those of men. In the past it was the legal policy in many places that men had to do those things in the names of women because women were biologically incapable of making those choices and contracts on a reliable basis. As recently as the 1960s, it was often impossible for women to get insurance without having a man sign for them. It is one of the most appalling things in this argument that people calling themselves feminists are insisting, essentially, that those anti-feminist men were right and that women have a right to not be believed when they say "yes".
That adults have to have these things pointed out to them is a real scandal. That the supposed intellectual class that college and university students are alleged to be needs to have them pointed out to them leads me to think that the age of adulthood is probably set far too low, in too many cases. It isn't merely a situation that applies to women, there has been a general infantalization of the culture in the past few decades, under the influence of commercial media. If the puerile antics of ivy league frat boys didn't lead to that conclusion the claims of those who push the idea that adults who have given consent to sex can, even days or weeks later, decide that their unsuspecting partner raped them, confirms that the childishness isn't restricted to the frat boys.
It is simply and plainly unrealistic to think that universities can both treat their students as adults, respecting their ability to make their own choices and also to protect those adults from their bad choices, especially those made in private, without any witnesses to corroborate the claims of one side or the other when disputed claims are made. Since almost all college students are legally adults, universities can't be forced to both treat them as if they were minor children, on the one hand and full adults possessing the full right and responsibilities of adulthood. Even insisting on them doing both at the same time won't make that possible and that is exactly what is being demanded of them in this case.
That is especially true when it is a question of rape among adults, when the existence of a crime hinges on consent being given or the request to have sex refused, something that generally happens in private, without witnesses.
It is a right of adults to consent or reject to have sex and the crime of rape hinges on the question of consent and unless that is in writing, in a form which can be used as evidence, that will always depend on whether or not one or the other is believed. That it is unsexy as hell to turn consent, each and every time, into a written contract would make the suggestion of it absurd. But if one party can claim to not believe the verbal assent or refusal of the other or claim that they get a right to change the meaning of their "yes" to "no" after the fact, the only way to avoid claims of rape is to write it out, every time. The fact that consent to having sex is often implied by the absence of an explicit if not forceful refusal, and that, in many cases going back to someone's room or car can imply consent and is often understood as consent makes it especially important that no claims that the words "yes" and "no" do not have have real, binding and final meaning are made or tolerated by rational adults.
The sexist ambient culture in which women live being what it is, it is in the interest of everyone that ambiguities be eliminated, not claimed as some kind of expression of freedom and, irrationally, adulthood.
It is important to remember that in this post I'm addressing only the matter of rape of rational adults, not of minor children and adults who are intellectually unable to give legal consent. The issues and rational conclusions about sexual abuse of those people is a far different and far less ambiguous matter, something that is often forgotten in the general smokescreen raised around the issue of sex and rights.
--------
Mixing in intoxication doesn't help at all. There is a reason that alcohol was used as the original date rape drug, it impairs judgment and leads people to do things that they, sober, would not do. It is often easier to talk a drunk person into doing things that they will later regret. It is easier to get a drunk person to surrender their money than a sober one, one of the reasons that casinos keep the drinks flowing. And it is often easier for an objectionable sex partner to get consent from someone who is drunk.* There is a term for that and it isn't rape, it is "I got drunk and made a fool of myself" or "I got drunk and he/she made a fool of me". There is a difference between being made a fool, especially by yourself, and being the victim of a crime.
Which is different from rape, non-consensual sex, which is often a result of one or both parties being drunk. Like it or not, someone who gets very drunk and passes out has made themselves more vulnerable to being raped. A child has the excuse of being a child with the presumed lack of understanding and judgement and experience with alcohol. an excuse which is essential to their right to enhanced levels of protection due to their lack of maturity. An adult will find it far harder to escape the expectation that they should have known the possible consequences of getting drunk, especially in a milieu which places them in greater danger of being attacked. There is no argument that will keep that question out of peoples' minds in judging an attack made on someone who has voluntarily done to themselves what a creep who slips them a drug does to them involuntarily. To pretend that even judges instructing juries or prosecutors deciding which cases are realistically prosecuted can change that fact is, as well, demanding the impossible. People are not going to ignore the acts of even credible victims helping set up the scenario in which they were attacked. If they were predisposed to believe the accused the choice of the accuser to be drunk will provide them with an excuse to not believe the accusation.
There is nothing feminist about denying reality. There is nothing liberating about denying reality. There is nothing feminist about pretending that the impossible is possible or pretending to have achieved that impossible condition is likely to lead to better results. That currently sold model of feminism, in which women act as frat boys and Hollywood producers want them to, pretending that the choice to act that way isn't the product of thorough training and indoctrination by the media does nothing to enhance the conditions women live in. The currently sold brand of feminism is a huge step backwards. Programs like "Friends" on the less damaging end of things, in a million ads and commercials in the middle and in even mainstream movies on the worst, all teach women the worst ideas that Betty Friedan pointed out oppressed women a half a century ago. Minus the house work, perhaps. June Cleaver's house work in high heels is about the only thing missing. But I'm only going to deal with one part of that program of self-imposed backlash.
There is nothing liberating about getting drunk, suspending judgment, impairing an ability to watch out for yourself and, in the event of an attack, to defend yourself. Getting drunk turns an adult into a vulnerable child who is more easily taken advantage of by people who want to do that and of making choices they would not have made, sober. Taking one drink and keeping your adult abilities intact is one thing, getting drunk to the point where you lose those is entirely different. Getting drunk is an escape from adult responsibilities and it carries a loss of the ability to exercise rights. There is no way that a university or even the judicial system can step in and do for an adult what they claim is their sole responsibility to do. There is nothing that enhances the rights of women in insisting that isn't the case, attempting to claim, both. To insist on a right to that an unnamed form of in loco parentis while objecting to it as being patronizing is to insist on having a right to both of two opposing alternatives at the same time. Insisting on that impossible condition does nothing to enhance the standing of feminism as a serious movement that serious people have a moral obligation to take seriously.
The currently unfashionable "second-wave" feminism was such a movement. That is the reason it was the target of the media and political backlash that includes "third-wave" "feminism". It was a movement by serious women who demanded their full rights including that the aspects of culture that oppressed them had to be changed. That it was women who were demanding their rights, issues of sex were central to that and that impinged on what people found sexually stimulating, in all too many ways based in differential levels of power and status**. In all too many cases, the culture has reinforced those to sell people on things through what they were accustomed to finding sexually appealing, including aspects of that which are oppressive. The old ideas about women and men were oppressive, the idea that there were major intellectual and mental differences between men and women were used to oppress women. There is no way to retain the belief in those differences, to have them embedded in the culture and in the law and to achieve full equality. Yet that is exactly what the currently fashionable thing that has hijacked the word "feminism" insists on doing. It won't happen, no matter how many times you insist that it will.
* Back in the 1970s, in response to the inevitable problems of having gay life so tied up in bars, there was an all too minor and all too short lived sobriety effort among gay folk. Part of the problem was people waking up to find that they'd agreed to have sex with someone they really didn't want to or in ways they would rather not have or should not have often consenting to it. Getting drunk while gay was not liberating, it wasn't positive, it wasn't good, it created problems and, in a lot of cases, destroyed lives.
I've come to think that the current model of feminism creates, in some ways, a situation similar to that which gay men experienced in the run up to AIDS, in which the most irresponsible and puerile behavior was sold as liberating and celebrated as such. Biology, hard truth, reality shows that isn't sustainable and the results are not liberating. Not even on a rather short term.
** Another similarity with the struggle for gay rights and the fact that gay men are often their own worst oppressors through the sexualization of inequality.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Owning Adulthood 1
In the discussion of the comments made by Stephen Trachtenberg which I wrote about yesterday, there are several problems. Since I have young nieces who are influenced by this and similar discussions, I'll go through some of those one by one.
There is the accusation that someone who pointed out problems with the case made at Mother Jones, Jezebel blog and other places is "putting the onus on the victims of rape".
Well, no, that onus isn't placed on those who make accusations of rape it's placed on anyone who makes any accusation of wrongdoing and, especially, law breaking. That's an inescapable consequence of the law making a presumption of the innocence of those who are accused, ideally the basis of the American justice system. If that isn't the basis of how justice is done then any entirely innocent person could be accused of a crime and they would be responsible for proving that they were innocent. History shows that even in the United States, when the presumption of innocence is suspended that the results have not favored those who are not privileged. Poor people, social outcasts, ethnic minorities, women, have all suffered under systems where the presumption of innocence isn't the basis of justice as it is really administered.
Anyone who has not been convicted under due process is not "known" to be guilty. That is as true of those accused of rape as it is those accused of any other crime. In too many cases, including in rape cases, convictions have been shown to be false and people have been proven to have, actually, been innocent. No one should get to begin by assuming that someone who is accused is guilty or that everyone who makes an accusation is a victim of a crime. That a crime was committed has to be established even before someone can sustain an accusation against someone. If that's not the standard that is followed, all hell breaks loose.
If you want examples of what happens when that isn't the case, you can look at the infamous Stuart case in Boston, where an accusation was against an unnamed "black man"made by a white man who murdered his wife and then shot himself to deflect suspicion from him. A real black man was arrested and brutalized and perp walked before the entire world's media before Charles Stuart was shown to be the real criminal who committed the murder of his own wife, who committed the "assault with a firearm" on himself. You can also look at the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in which no crime took place and, it is quite possible, the "victims" were pressured into making false accusations by the assumption that something must have happened under the circumstances. In that case the accusations were almost certainly coerced by social and legal expectations and a presumption that the young white women were victims and that the teenage boys were rapists when nothing happened. The entire injustice was created by a presumption of, not only guilt, but of a crime having happened.
There is no possible perfect justice system that can be administered by people, an imperfect one is the best we can achieve. But there are ways to prevent the casual insertion of common forms on injustice into it. Putting the onus on the accuser and the prosecutor is one of the most important of those measures. That the presumption of innocence might, sometimes, be especially vulnerable to allowing the guilty to escape punishment is the result of the crime hinging on the question of consent being given, in private. It is also vulnerable due to the fact that the accused may be able to excuse their actions by claiming to have done what they were given permission to do. That is an inescapable problem with the presumption of innocence but there isn't any remedy that isn't liable to even worse problems arising.
As an aside, the political and social milieu in which this question is argued doesn't help clarify things when it also champions such things as bondage sex, sexual sadism and other things associated with the practices of rapists and those who prey on vulnerable people. You can't have it both ways. You can claim to have a right to the full range of sexual depravity that is based on creating and exacerbating differences in power and control, claiming a right to degrade and abuse people for sexual gratification but you will find it impossible to insist that they have a right to presume that other people will have a heightened respect for their full right to personal dignity and autonomy at the same time. That distinction is damaged and destroyed, you won't find that there is a universal safe word that works when you play like that. Mix in the insistence on that at ever earlier ages of consent and with alcohol and drugs mixed in and you are insisting on the right to something even as you make it impossible to have it.
Choices matter in real life. Real choices have real and effective consequences. You choose one alternative and you accept the results, those you like and those you don't.
You can choose that people act like adults who respect the rights of other people or you can have people who don't respect those rights when it comes to you.
You either get to claim the right to dignity and respect for autonomy in sex or you get to accept sexual incidents that include the denial of dignity and the respect for autonomy. You don't get to claim a right to the presumption of innocence when it suits you but, then, to deny that right when its results don't suit you. Responsible adults don't try to have it both ways and irresponsible ones who insist they do aren't allowed to do that by responsible adults. And that isn't a matter of gender it is the difference between being a responsible adult and a person who can't and so isn't allowed to have the full measure of personal autonomy and choice in their life. Accepting responsibility for your choices is the basis of adult autonomy and agency, the only means of achieving that.
I have to say there is something a little disgusting about having to point these things out to people deputed to be adults. It is an extension of the disgusting situation in which "adults" of college age have to be told by a college president that they are endangering themselves by choosing to get drunk. Something they should have known years earlier. It is especially disgusting when people even far older than college age who are told that holler and complain that the person telling them what is obviously true and responsible are violating their rights as adults to do stupid stuff and expect that their university is responsible for preventing them being harmed by their own choices. That's not something the feminists I knew in the 1970s would have done, they were all about claiming their rights as adult women and owning all of what that means.
There is the accusation that someone who pointed out problems with the case made at Mother Jones, Jezebel blog and other places is "putting the onus on the victims of rape".
Well, no, that onus isn't placed on those who make accusations of rape it's placed on anyone who makes any accusation of wrongdoing and, especially, law breaking. That's an inescapable consequence of the law making a presumption of the innocence of those who are accused, ideally the basis of the American justice system. If that isn't the basis of how justice is done then any entirely innocent person could be accused of a crime and they would be responsible for proving that they were innocent. History shows that even in the United States, when the presumption of innocence is suspended that the results have not favored those who are not privileged. Poor people, social outcasts, ethnic minorities, women, have all suffered under systems where the presumption of innocence isn't the basis of justice as it is really administered.
Anyone who has not been convicted under due process is not "known" to be guilty. That is as true of those accused of rape as it is those accused of any other crime. In too many cases, including in rape cases, convictions have been shown to be false and people have been proven to have, actually, been innocent. No one should get to begin by assuming that someone who is accused is guilty or that everyone who makes an accusation is a victim of a crime. That a crime was committed has to be established even before someone can sustain an accusation against someone. If that's not the standard that is followed, all hell breaks loose.
If you want examples of what happens when that isn't the case, you can look at the infamous Stuart case in Boston, where an accusation was against an unnamed "black man"made by a white man who murdered his wife and then shot himself to deflect suspicion from him. A real black man was arrested and brutalized and perp walked before the entire world's media before Charles Stuart was shown to be the real criminal who committed the murder of his own wife, who committed the "assault with a firearm" on himself. You can also look at the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in which no crime took place and, it is quite possible, the "victims" were pressured into making false accusations by the assumption that something must have happened under the circumstances. In that case the accusations were almost certainly coerced by social and legal expectations and a presumption that the young white women were victims and that the teenage boys were rapists when nothing happened. The entire injustice was created by a presumption of, not only guilt, but of a crime having happened.
There is no possible perfect justice system that can be administered by people, an imperfect one is the best we can achieve. But there are ways to prevent the casual insertion of common forms on injustice into it. Putting the onus on the accuser and the prosecutor is one of the most important of those measures. That the presumption of innocence might, sometimes, be especially vulnerable to allowing the guilty to escape punishment is the result of the crime hinging on the question of consent being given, in private. It is also vulnerable due to the fact that the accused may be able to excuse their actions by claiming to have done what they were given permission to do. That is an inescapable problem with the presumption of innocence but there isn't any remedy that isn't liable to even worse problems arising.
As an aside, the political and social milieu in which this question is argued doesn't help clarify things when it also champions such things as bondage sex, sexual sadism and other things associated with the practices of rapists and those who prey on vulnerable people. You can't have it both ways. You can claim to have a right to the full range of sexual depravity that is based on creating and exacerbating differences in power and control, claiming a right to degrade and abuse people for sexual gratification but you will find it impossible to insist that they have a right to presume that other people will have a heightened respect for their full right to personal dignity and autonomy at the same time. That distinction is damaged and destroyed, you won't find that there is a universal safe word that works when you play like that. Mix in the insistence on that at ever earlier ages of consent and with alcohol and drugs mixed in and you are insisting on the right to something even as you make it impossible to have it.
Choices matter in real life. Real choices have real and effective consequences. You choose one alternative and you accept the results, those you like and those you don't.
You can choose that people act like adults who respect the rights of other people or you can have people who don't respect those rights when it comes to you.
You either get to claim the right to dignity and respect for autonomy in sex or you get to accept sexual incidents that include the denial of dignity and the respect for autonomy. You don't get to claim a right to the presumption of innocence when it suits you but, then, to deny that right when its results don't suit you. Responsible adults don't try to have it both ways and irresponsible ones who insist they do aren't allowed to do that by responsible adults. And that isn't a matter of gender it is the difference between being a responsible adult and a person who can't and so isn't allowed to have the full measure of personal autonomy and choice in their life. Accepting responsibility for your choices is the basis of adult autonomy and agency, the only means of achieving that.
I have to say there is something a little disgusting about having to point these things out to people deputed to be adults. It is an extension of the disgusting situation in which "adults" of college age have to be told by a college president that they are endangering themselves by choosing to get drunk. Something they should have known years earlier. It is especially disgusting when people even far older than college age who are told that holler and complain that the person telling them what is obviously true and responsible are violating their rights as adults to do stupid stuff and expect that their university is responsible for preventing them being harmed by their own choices. That's not something the feminists I knew in the 1970s would have done, they were all about claiming their rights as adult women and owning all of what that means.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Like It Or Not People Who Get Drunk Share The Blame When They Are The Victims of People Who Prey On Drunk People
The word "mansplaining" seemed really useful to me the first times I heard it, back when it was used to describe the condescending manner in which men talked to women, often feigning explanation when what they were doing was articulating their sense of entitlement at the expense of women. But that quite valuable use of the word has given way to it meaning just that some man, somewhere has said something that some woman or women don't like.
It is hardly the only useful word that is stolen to be used in a way that ruins its usefulness, "irony", "troll", "The First (or Second) Amendment", virtually all the names of the common classical fallacies of debate have undergone this kind of abuse and diminution of usefulness. It's my guess that the rise of the internet and the explosion of unedited babbling by the soi disant educated class has accelerated this kind of thing. There is no surer sign of a mid-brow with a degree than the dishonest application of the names of logical fallacies.
This article by Dana Liebelson, Controversial Former College President Mansplains Alleged Rape Victim, is part of the piled on response to Stephen Trachtenberg, the former president of George Washington University, saying that women on college campuses needed to have the dangers of getting drunk pointed out to them. Not having heard the program he said it on, here is how the incident was described in the Washington Post.
“Without making the victims . . . responsible for what happens, one of the groups that have to be trained not to drink in excess are women,” Trachtenberg said on the [Diane Rehm] show. “They need to be in a position to punch the guys in the nose if they misbehave. And so part of the problem is you have men who take advantage of women who drink too much. And there are women who drink too much. And we need to educate our daughters and our children on that — in that regard.”
A few minutes later, another panelist on the show questioned Trachtenberg’s remarks. Caitlin Flanagan, a writer for the Atlantic, said she wanted to “take a slight exception or maybe a real exception to what Dr. Trachtenberg is saying about how if young women are sober they have a better chance of protecting themselves from rape by being able to punch the guy in the nose. That’s not a realistic strategy for protecting ourselves from rape.”
Well, no it isn't a strategy but it would certainly be part of any realistic strategy for preventing campus rapes or any other kinds of attacks. People who get drunk or drugged are at increased risk of being preyed upon by the kinds of people who take advantage of people who are vulnerable to them. It's part of the reason that rich people so much more often rob poor people instead of rich ones, even stone cold teetotalers, because they are more vulnerable than rich people. People who are drunk, not just women, are obvious targets for people who want to take advantage of them and harm them. Men who get drunk are certainly at a higher risk of being raped. And men are raped, by men and by women, apparently at a far higher rate then you might guess. Being gay, it is the rape of men by men I know the most about and for a long time and, I would guess, even today, the idea that a gay man would accuse another man of raping him would have been laughed out of the police station, never mind the courts as being incredible. A straight man who made the accusation would have been taken more seriously, though both a combination of the stigma or being raped and the suspicion that the man was covertly gay would certainly impede many criminal complaints being filed. I think a lot of the refusal to see rape as a problem for anyone except women might be due to the failure of male victims to come forward.
I remember way back in the period when sobriety became an all too minor and all too short term fad in some gay circles that a lot the discussions about the consequences of gay life being centered around bars included the fact that being drunk made you vulnerable to people who wanted to take advantage of your impairment. Were the people who pointed that out "straightsplaining"?
Liebelson says:
In the midst of this controversy, a woman who says she was raped when she was a George Washington student in the early 2000s and was "extremely traumatized" by how the university handled her case confronted Trachtenberg via email to share her experience and denounce his remarks. In an email response, Trachtenberg, now a professor at the school, said her story "surely entitles you to your anger" and implored her to "tell me exactly what I said that you think I need to be ashamed of." The exchange was obtained by Mother Jones.
Following the NPR show, the woman—who asked not to be named—emailed Trachtenberg about her case and said:
…Your recent remarks on the Diane Rehm show disgust me. Shame on you. Shame on the message that you have just sent to millions of women, millions of daughters, and millions of us survivors. I hope you can take the time to reflect on your statements and understand the impact of your words.
In interviews with Mother Jones, the woman recounted what happened to her. She said she was raped on campus by a fellow student, in the middle of the day, with no alcohol or drugs involved. She didn't immediately report the assault, but after she began to experience depression and symptoms of PTSD, she decided to take a leave of absence. According to documents she provided to Mother Jones, a counselor recorded the account of her rape and an associate dean examined her records in order to approve the leave. "No one ever talked to me about my options," she said. "No one suggested reporting to the police or going through the student judicial process." Maralee Csellar, a George Washington spokeswoman, said she can't comment on the case due to privacy laws.
Notice buried in Libelson's text is this statement, " she was raped on campus by a fellow student, in the middle of the day, with no alcohol or drugs involved." "NO ALCOHOL OR DRUGS INVOLVED" which you would think could lead a reasonable person to conclude that a comment about the role of alcohol in rape wasn't relevant to the woman's case. Why would a professional journalist choose that incident to condemn Trachtenberg's comment when the victim's statement proves that it isn't covered by what Trachtenberg said? Why would the victim think she was covered by a statement about the dangers of being drunk since she wasn't drunk at the time she was raped?
The LGBT rights movement, the feminist movement, civil rights movements claiming the rights of ethnic and racial groups are all based on the right of adults to self determination within the framework of mutually held rights. It is a demand that they get to exercise the full range of rights of adults when they achieve adulthood and as children, while they are still children. No civil rights movement that doesn't accept the necessity of those rights also coming with responsibilities to other people and for your own actions will succeed or produce good. All of them must accept that just as the rights they demand are equally held, so are the responsibilities that come with adulthood.
Young women I know today are being sold a number of stupid ideas in the name of feminism, it would seem mostly from online sources. There are similar campaigns of folly in other movements, certainly among gay men. A number of those ideas are not adults demanding their rights and accepting their responsibility as adults, they are adults gaming the language of liberation to claim a right to be irresponsible and to attack people for saying reasonable things. Those stupid ideas have nothing to do with adults demanding their full rights as adult citizens of the world. And a lot of those are around the issue of adults taking responsibility for their bad choices and the stupid idea that you taking responsibility as an adult is unrelated to your ability to exercise legitimate rights. The false claim is that being realistic about this excuses the behavior of criminals who do what criminals do, take advantage of the weakness of other people, especially when that weakness is voluntary, in the form of getting drunk or being drugged is, somehow, oppressing you.
The issue of rape figures into a lot of them, as could be expected when it seems to be a right to get plastered in venues in which predators are known to prey on vulnerable people that is being claimed. Well, guess what, such human predators are not going to be driven into extinction by any campaign or any laws, rapists are already breaking the law just as certainly as the people who roll drunks and take their wallets are. And if the police and the justice system can't stop people from rolling drunks or raping drunk people then colleges and universities aren't going to stop that happening either.
I have nieces and nephews in college and in the age group which has been sold the stupid idea that there is a right to get drunk and that people who voluntarily get drunk share no part in the strategy of people who are out hunting for drunk people to victimize. I despise the "journalists" and bloggers who sell people their age on irresponsible behavior that could end up getting them attacked, raped or murdered.
There is nothing in noting that people who choose to get drunk are doing a good part of the criminals' work for them in making themselves into easier marks that exonerates the criminal.
The example of someone who gets their wallet stolen when they are drunk is a perfect example of why, even if they could get the sympathy of those willing to ignore their part in it, their wallet would still be as missing as if they took all of the blame. But they don't. Stealing someones' wallet is a crime. About the only improbable defense relevant to this argument would be if the thief could claim that the wallet was given voluntarily, something that happens far less often than consent to have sex.
The only difference is that with rape is that a rapist can claim that there was consent. And, no matter how much you might not like it, that means of defense will always be open to someone making an accusation of rape who was drunk not remembering giving consent or not realizing they have. Getting drunk impairs the memory which will will make the that of use in defending accused rapists in court. If there were witnesses who could say that the accuser was extremely drunk it would make a conviction far less likely if the standard of judgement was on the level of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. People accused of rape couldn't easily use that in their defense if the accuser was known to never drink and if the prosecution could make a credible claim that the accuser had not been drinking at the time of the attack.
I know nothing about Stephen Trachtenberg except what I've read about him this morning and didn't hear the show but I don't see anything in what he's quoted as saying that warrants the response it's gotten. If there was worse I'd imagine they'd include that, in the absence of that, he's getting railroaded in the media.
There is, my fellow adults, no right to get drunk. Being drunk is a voluntary mental impairment, a voluntary suspension of the ability to act like a responsible adult for the term of inebriation. And, worse, there is no possibility that getting drunk is not going to figure into the defense on a charge of rape. That people of the age of college students hadn't already been taught that they are setting themselves up by getting drunk, that they needed to be told that as young adults is a scandalous proof that our society is negligent. Pretending that getting drunk isn't a problem and that it shouldn't be discouraged and prevented isn't feminist, it is an abdication of responsibility. And if you think that me pointing that out is condescending, well, there really isn't any other way to address ideas that are so childish, so badly thought through and so unrealistically self-indulgent that avoids talking down to those thoughts. Make an argument on an adult level and it can be addressed in a way that doesn't have to deal with the childishness in these claims.
It is hardly the only useful word that is stolen to be used in a way that ruins its usefulness, "irony", "troll", "The First (or Second) Amendment", virtually all the names of the common classical fallacies of debate have undergone this kind of abuse and diminution of usefulness. It's my guess that the rise of the internet and the explosion of unedited babbling by the soi disant educated class has accelerated this kind of thing. There is no surer sign of a mid-brow with a degree than the dishonest application of the names of logical fallacies.
This article by Dana Liebelson, Controversial Former College President Mansplains Alleged Rape Victim, is part of the piled on response to Stephen Trachtenberg, the former president of George Washington University, saying that women on college campuses needed to have the dangers of getting drunk pointed out to them. Not having heard the program he said it on, here is how the incident was described in the Washington Post.
“Without making the victims . . . responsible for what happens, one of the groups that have to be trained not to drink in excess are women,” Trachtenberg said on the [Diane Rehm] show. “They need to be in a position to punch the guys in the nose if they misbehave. And so part of the problem is you have men who take advantage of women who drink too much. And there are women who drink too much. And we need to educate our daughters and our children on that — in that regard.”
A few minutes later, another panelist on the show questioned Trachtenberg’s remarks. Caitlin Flanagan, a writer for the Atlantic, said she wanted to “take a slight exception or maybe a real exception to what Dr. Trachtenberg is saying about how if young women are sober they have a better chance of protecting themselves from rape by being able to punch the guy in the nose. That’s not a realistic strategy for protecting ourselves from rape.”
Well, no it isn't a strategy but it would certainly be part of any realistic strategy for preventing campus rapes or any other kinds of attacks. People who get drunk or drugged are at increased risk of being preyed upon by the kinds of people who take advantage of people who are vulnerable to them. It's part of the reason that rich people so much more often rob poor people instead of rich ones, even stone cold teetotalers, because they are more vulnerable than rich people. People who are drunk, not just women, are obvious targets for people who want to take advantage of them and harm them. Men who get drunk are certainly at a higher risk of being raped. And men are raped, by men and by women, apparently at a far higher rate then you might guess. Being gay, it is the rape of men by men I know the most about and for a long time and, I would guess, even today, the idea that a gay man would accuse another man of raping him would have been laughed out of the police station, never mind the courts as being incredible. A straight man who made the accusation would have been taken more seriously, though both a combination of the stigma or being raped and the suspicion that the man was covertly gay would certainly impede many criminal complaints being filed. I think a lot of the refusal to see rape as a problem for anyone except women might be due to the failure of male victims to come forward.
I remember way back in the period when sobriety became an all too minor and all too short term fad in some gay circles that a lot the discussions about the consequences of gay life being centered around bars included the fact that being drunk made you vulnerable to people who wanted to take advantage of your impairment. Were the people who pointed that out "straightsplaining"?
Liebelson says:
In the midst of this controversy, a woman who says she was raped when she was a George Washington student in the early 2000s and was "extremely traumatized" by how the university handled her case confronted Trachtenberg via email to share her experience and denounce his remarks. In an email response, Trachtenberg, now a professor at the school, said her story "surely entitles you to your anger" and implored her to "tell me exactly what I said that you think I need to be ashamed of." The exchange was obtained by Mother Jones.
Following the NPR show, the woman—who asked not to be named—emailed Trachtenberg about her case and said:
…Your recent remarks on the Diane Rehm show disgust me. Shame on you. Shame on the message that you have just sent to millions of women, millions of daughters, and millions of us survivors. I hope you can take the time to reflect on your statements and understand the impact of your words.
In interviews with Mother Jones, the woman recounted what happened to her. She said she was raped on campus by a fellow student, in the middle of the day, with no alcohol or drugs involved. She didn't immediately report the assault, but after she began to experience depression and symptoms of PTSD, she decided to take a leave of absence. According to documents she provided to Mother Jones, a counselor recorded the account of her rape and an associate dean examined her records in order to approve the leave. "No one ever talked to me about my options," she said. "No one suggested reporting to the police or going through the student judicial process." Maralee Csellar, a George Washington spokeswoman, said she can't comment on the case due to privacy laws.
Notice buried in Libelson's text is this statement, " she was raped on campus by a fellow student, in the middle of the day, with no alcohol or drugs involved." "NO ALCOHOL OR DRUGS INVOLVED" which you would think could lead a reasonable person to conclude that a comment about the role of alcohol in rape wasn't relevant to the woman's case. Why would a professional journalist choose that incident to condemn Trachtenberg's comment when the victim's statement proves that it isn't covered by what Trachtenberg said? Why would the victim think she was covered by a statement about the dangers of being drunk since she wasn't drunk at the time she was raped?
The LGBT rights movement, the feminist movement, civil rights movements claiming the rights of ethnic and racial groups are all based on the right of adults to self determination within the framework of mutually held rights. It is a demand that they get to exercise the full range of rights of adults when they achieve adulthood and as children, while they are still children. No civil rights movement that doesn't accept the necessity of those rights also coming with responsibilities to other people and for your own actions will succeed or produce good. All of them must accept that just as the rights they demand are equally held, so are the responsibilities that come with adulthood.
Young women I know today are being sold a number of stupid ideas in the name of feminism, it would seem mostly from online sources. There are similar campaigns of folly in other movements, certainly among gay men. A number of those ideas are not adults demanding their rights and accepting their responsibility as adults, they are adults gaming the language of liberation to claim a right to be irresponsible and to attack people for saying reasonable things. Those stupid ideas have nothing to do with adults demanding their full rights as adult citizens of the world. And a lot of those are around the issue of adults taking responsibility for their bad choices and the stupid idea that you taking responsibility as an adult is unrelated to your ability to exercise legitimate rights. The false claim is that being realistic about this excuses the behavior of criminals who do what criminals do, take advantage of the weakness of other people, especially when that weakness is voluntary, in the form of getting drunk or being drugged is, somehow, oppressing you.
The issue of rape figures into a lot of them, as could be expected when it seems to be a right to get plastered in venues in which predators are known to prey on vulnerable people that is being claimed. Well, guess what, such human predators are not going to be driven into extinction by any campaign or any laws, rapists are already breaking the law just as certainly as the people who roll drunks and take their wallets are. And if the police and the justice system can't stop people from rolling drunks or raping drunk people then colleges and universities aren't going to stop that happening either.
I have nieces and nephews in college and in the age group which has been sold the stupid idea that there is a right to get drunk and that people who voluntarily get drunk share no part in the strategy of people who are out hunting for drunk people to victimize. I despise the "journalists" and bloggers who sell people their age on irresponsible behavior that could end up getting them attacked, raped or murdered.
There is nothing in noting that people who choose to get drunk are doing a good part of the criminals' work for them in making themselves into easier marks that exonerates the criminal.
The example of someone who gets their wallet stolen when they are drunk is a perfect example of why, even if they could get the sympathy of those willing to ignore their part in it, their wallet would still be as missing as if they took all of the blame. But they don't. Stealing someones' wallet is a crime. About the only improbable defense relevant to this argument would be if the thief could claim that the wallet was given voluntarily, something that happens far less often than consent to have sex.
The only difference is that with rape is that a rapist can claim that there was consent. And, no matter how much you might not like it, that means of defense will always be open to someone making an accusation of rape who was drunk not remembering giving consent or not realizing they have. Getting drunk impairs the memory which will will make the that of use in defending accused rapists in court. If there were witnesses who could say that the accuser was extremely drunk it would make a conviction far less likely if the standard of judgement was on the level of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. People accused of rape couldn't easily use that in their defense if the accuser was known to never drink and if the prosecution could make a credible claim that the accuser had not been drinking at the time of the attack.
I know nothing about Stephen Trachtenberg except what I've read about him this morning and didn't hear the show but I don't see anything in what he's quoted as saying that warrants the response it's gotten. If there was worse I'd imagine they'd include that, in the absence of that, he's getting railroaded in the media.
There is, my fellow adults, no right to get drunk. Being drunk is a voluntary mental impairment, a voluntary suspension of the ability to act like a responsible adult for the term of inebriation. And, worse, there is no possibility that getting drunk is not going to figure into the defense on a charge of rape. That people of the age of college students hadn't already been taught that they are setting themselves up by getting drunk, that they needed to be told that as young adults is a scandalous proof that our society is negligent. Pretending that getting drunk isn't a problem and that it shouldn't be discouraged and prevented isn't feminist, it is an abdication of responsibility. And if you think that me pointing that out is condescending, well, there really isn't any other way to address ideas that are so childish, so badly thought through and so unrealistically self-indulgent that avoids talking down to those thoughts. Make an argument on an adult level and it can be addressed in a way that doesn't have to deal with the childishness in these claims.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Bill Cunliffe
Mary Lou's Blues
Live at the Culver Club featuring Bill Cunliffe - Piano, Tom Warrington - Bass, Paul Kreibich - Drums, Andy Martin - Trombone, Bob Summers - Trumpet, Rickey Woodard - Tenor Sax and Bob Sheppard - Alto Sax
Not the "Mary Lou Blues" I was looking for, a great boogy-woogy style piece by my favorite and Bill Cunliffe's teacher, Mary Lou Williams with post-war parallel chords on just about every note and wonderful inventiveness (not big on boogy-woogy style playing but hers is entirely worth hearing). Bill Cunliffe is a great arranger, composer and player whose work I'm not very familiar with. I hope to change that.
The Joys of Paying for Dentistry: An Eschange on The Brat Below
Having typical musician's teeth, the product of lean years and deferred treatment - I had an involved session at the dentist bad enough to need to recover at home - my articulation would scare away customers. Since so many on the left have concentrated their attention and efforts on making the world safe for the "art" of 14-year-old boys whose medium is feigned sex with statues instead of pushing through comprehensive, single-payer healthcare, I don't have dental coverage and the way I feel, I'm, as they say, pissed. AND I AM HOLDING THEM RESPONSIBLE! Why? I just am. Ok.
Here' an ongoing exchange.
Here' an ongoing exchange.
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