There is no debating as to whether or not Karl Pearson was a major figure in mainstream Darwinism or science, as was his teacher Francis Galton. For that we have the testimony of no one more than Charles Darwin who endorsed Galton's eugenics and other conclusions Galton drew from the theory of natural selection and so confirmed Galton's authority on the matter. Francis Galton was still alive and working when his prize student gave the lecture published as National Life From The Standpoint of Science. There is no evidence I found that he disagreed with that and the other equally putrid conclusions Pearson came to from mainstream Darwinism. He trusted Pearson to the extent that he named him as his official biographer.
If you haven't read much of the literature of the first generation of Darwinists, starting with Charles Darwin, going to those scientists he cited most glowingly to support natural selection, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, you might be surprised at the excerpt I typed out below to prove my point that even a renowned socialist, though a British mainstream, Fabian socialist, would present conclusions from the theory of natural selection that are indistinguishable from Nazi discourses of two to four decades after he presented this. He sounds exactly like today's neo-Nazis with a better writing style . Starting on page 21.
What I have said about bad stock seems to me to hold for the lower races of man. How many centuries, how many thousand of years, have the Kaffir or the negro held large districts in Africa undisturbed by the white man? Yet their intertribal struggles have not yet produced a civilization in the last comparable with the Aryan. Educate and nurture them as you will, I do not believe that you will succeed in modifying the stock. History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection do to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended.
If you bring the white man into contact with the black, you too often suspend the very process of natural selection on the evolution on which the evolution of a higher type depends. You get superior and inferior races living on the same soil, and that coexistence is demoralizing for both. They naturally sink into the position of master and servant, if not admittedly or covertly into that of slave-owner and slave. Frequently they intercross, and if the bad stock be raised the good is lowered. Even in the case of Eurasians, of whom I have met mentally and physically fine specimens, I have felt how much better they would have been had they been pure Asiatics or pure Europeans. Thus it comes about that when the struggle for existence between races is suspended, the solution of great problems may be unnaturally postponed; instead of the slow, stern processes of evolution, cataclysmal solutions are prepared for the future. Such problems in suspense, it appears to me, are to be found in the negro population of the southern States of America, in the large admixture of Indian blood in some of the South American races, but, above all, in the Kaffir factor in south Africa.
You may possibly think that I am straying from my subject, but I want to justify natural selection to you. I want you to see selection as something which renders the inexorable law of heredity a source of progress which produces the good through suffering, an infinitely greater good which far outbalances the very obvious pain and evil. Let us suppose the alternative were possible. Let us suppose we we could prevent the white man, if we liked, from going to lands of which the agricultural and mineral resources are not worked to the full; then I should say a thousand times better for him that he should not go than that he should settle down and live alongside the inferior race. The only healthy alternative is that he should go and completely drive out the inferior race. That is practically what the white man has done in North America. We sometimes forget the light that chapter in history throws on more recent experiences. Some 250 years ago there was a man who fought in our country against taxation without representation, and another man who did not mind going to prison for the sake of his religious opinions. As Englishmen we are proud of them both, but we sometimes forget that they were both considerable capitalists for their age, and started charted compaines in another continent. Well, a good deal went on in the plantations they founded, if not with their knowledge with that at least of their servants and of their successors, which would shock us all at the present day. But I venture to say that no man calmly judging will wish either that whites had never gone to America, or would desire that whites and Red Indians were to-day living alongside each other as negro and white in the Southern States, as Kaffir and European in South Africa, still less that they had mixed thier blood as Spaniard and Indian in South America. The civilization of the white man is a civilization dependent upon free white labour, and when that element of stability is removed it will collapse like those of Greece and Rome. I venture to assert, then, that the struggle for existence between white and red man, painful and even terrible as it was in its details, has given us a good far outbalancing its immediate evil. In place of the red man, contributing practically nothing to the work and thought of the world, we have a great nation, mistress of many arts, and able, with its youthful imagination and fresh, untrammeled impulses, to contribute much to the common stock of civilized man. Against that we have only to put the romantic sympathy for the Red Indian generated by the novels of Cooper and the poems of Longfellow, and then - see how little it weighs in the balance!
This differs in no way from the Nazi's theory of Lebensraum except that in their case it was white Europeans they killed instead of the inhabitants of The Americas. AND THAT IS NO KIND OF MORAL DISTINCTION OF ANY KIND UNLESS YOU ARE A RACIST. Nor, in fact, does it differ from Charles Darwin's own declarations on the great boon to the world that white men, especially Brits, going around the world doing what Pearson got his Aryan rocks off over in this scientific poison, killing entire racial groups and stealing their land and resources. You can hear the drooling enthusiasm for murder in his elegant Victorian prose.
Apparently, from the Appendices of the published volume, Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son was in the audience of a similar proto-Nazi talk by Pearson. In the notes on the discussion it says:
From our standpoint we are forced to realize that in judging of social conduct - e.g. - of the suitability of persons for charity, etc., we should be particular in inquiring concerning ancestry. Pity and help the weak, but remember that it is a national evil when any charitable or social institution allows the indefinite multiplication of the unfit in mind or body.
In all social work and in all legislative action true progress is impossible if the reformer and the legislator do not know and pay attention to the principles of heredity.
Major L. (Leonard) Darwin moved a vote of thanks to Professor Pearson, and said his own interest in the subject was inherited; and he gave an emphatic warning against the evils which may, without care, result from the present movement for educating defective children. The danger was lest their education, by making their departure from the ordinary standard less obvious should make it possible for them to marry and hand on their defects of mind and body to their descendants.
Just less than thirty-five years later, on the outbreak of World War Two, Leonard Darwin was still lauding the great progress, the great turn of German thought to the right direction since the Nazis instituted Darwinian principles in eugenic policy. You might note at the link, that Leonard Darwin, corresponding with Karl Pearson, said he was carrying on his father's work in his eugenics. There was and is no one with a higher standing to make that claim than Leonard Darwin, it is a definitive attribution.
Really, since I started this stuff more than a decade ago, I've found that I could open literally any writing of any of the major figures in the history of Darwinism, including those who knew Darwin personally and I could almost predict the depravity I would find which was explained as scientific fact on the basis of the theory of natural selection. Natural selection has always and will always generate these kinds of claims. It is inherent to the theory.
It is an irony that today's Republican-fascist party which contains so many bitter opponents of Darwinism that they, nevertheless, fully endorse the entire thing, natural selection, innate biological inequality, in so far as this kind of stuff is concerned. It's no more ironic, though, than that lefties who believe themselves to be champions of racial equality and the like turned the originator of this kind of proto-Nazism as science into a demi-god of secular, atheist, modernism. Especially when those lefties are Marxists. Karl Marx had an entirely more skeptical and critical view of it than they do.
Update: I forgot, I strongly suspect that one of those Englishmen of old that Pearson mentioned must have been William Penn, the founder of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. I can only imagine what he would have thought of being mentioned in such a putrid document, it is impossible to imagine he would have consented to being used for such an evil purpose.
Monday, July 16, 2018
All Governments, All Political Ideologies That Murder People And Oppress People Are The Same Despite Their Economic Theories
What really happens in reality is the test of every idea that people have about reality. I don't subscribe to the superstition of scientism which makes scientific method the test of everything - by the way, neither do the true believers in scientism, they're some of the worst violators of it, though that's for later - but that is the alleged gold standard of all scientific theories, that all theories, eventually, will stand or fall on the observation of physical objects to discern their composition, their forms, the forces that act on them and we can only discern from their OBSERVED effects on physical objects.
Marx and Engels and all the other theorists of communism sold their theories as being scientific in nature, as did the Nazis and fascists and many and various other ideologies that arose after the 17th century when science arose and became the most glamorous of intellectual framings. That means that when those theories are tested anyone looking at their claims has every right to judge them by the results, those who promote those theories as some aspect of science HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO JUDGE THE THEORIES ON THEIR OBSERVED RESULTS WHEN THEY ARE APPLIED.
The most salient fact of the application of Marx's theories of better governance is the fact that they have produced scores of millions of murders by the state and the state apparatus, the total and complete suppression of freedom, terror against the citizens of those countries, either of a low grade in which that terror took a general anxiety of surveillance and arrest, the witnessing of such arrests for what was said that did or might be construed to be against the ruling elite, or it might take the form it has during reigns of terror where public execution is witnessed regularly, in the cases of things like Mao's Cultural Revolution or the rule of the Kim dynasty in North Korea where they require grade school aged children to witness people being shot up on a regular basis - and that is those who aren't part of the massive, hereditary class of enslaved helots maintained by those governments.
It will be argued that it's unfair to note this because pure, clean Marxism has never been tried, as it can be argued that pure Christianity has never been tried. But the case that Christianity hasn't been tried is a lot better than that Marxism hasn't. You can easily point to the central commandments and claims of Jesus, the words of Paul and James and the others who defined the basis of Christianity in the Second Testament and prove that even the rule of Popes and "Christian Majesties(the very term is a self-contradiction) have repeatedly violated those basic principles of Christianity. I think the case that Marxist mass murder and suppression of rights is some violation of the gospel of Marx can't be sustained in a similar way. He envisioned communism, not in terms of democracy but in terms of a dictatorship allegedly of the working class, in itself an absurd idea. Dictatorships inevitably end up with a ruling criminal class elite, that is the observed nature of dictatorships.
I am not ashamed in my old age to have done what I should have done from the time I became aware of the nature of communism as it really is in the real world, I'm ashamed that I fell for the obscene notion that, somehow, the mass murders were "good" mass murders or at least to be unmentioned because the economic policy Marx espoused was so much better than that of capitalism. That is one of the most disgusting and obscene lines there is, it is exactly equivalent to fascists and Nazis discounting the murders that those ideologies, applied, inevitably produced in history. It is exactly the equivalent of what Marx saw and criticized in capitalism, the horrific and grinding oppression, the destruction of people and nature that is inherent in it, only on a far more accelerated time frame today from what he saw in the 19th century.
The most useful thing that Marxists in the post-war period had for gulling those who were gullible, as I was, were the anti-communists and their lies and excesses. But despising Red Channels, Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy, HUAC is no excuse for refusing to hold communism responsible for what communist governments did. While HUAC and Joe McCarthy were harassing a bunch of elite communists and their fellows here, depriving some Hollywood crap writers the right to have their names put on their scripts, the chance to earn fat salaries on the movies, and part of what they did that most people remember because, as RMJ pointed out here a while back, Hollywood likes to talk about Hollywood, people were being murdered, terrorized, deprived of every single right in every way by the very governments that the Hollywood 10, Bertold Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Corliss Lamont, etc. were supporting. Later on it was the "new left" of such things as the Maoist Progressive Labor Party who were breaking up the SDS as the Cultural Revolution was murdering millions. They're still romanticized by some older lefty magazine scribblers. And when those governments went after you, you were sent to concentration camps or killed. You know, exactly what Hitler would do to you if you said the wrong thing or were related to the wrong people.
That's what I'm ashamed of, that I fell for that line for a single second. I was never a Marxist or even much tempted to be one, mostly because I knew of those murders and that oppression, partly because I never really bought into the idea that sociology or history could be scientific. I'm ashamed that I was too much of a coward to say these things until I was in my fifties when I realized that someone murdered by communism was as dead and as murdered as someone murdered in a Nazi concentration camp or under the Italian invasion of Ethiopia or in the Japanese invasion of China or the Philippines. They are as dead as those murdered in the invasion and theft of the Americas or Australia, the dead under capitalism, those so casually murdered under the Victorian Poor Law.
Tell me why there is something good about the murders under communism and why the same claims can't be made by those who excuse the murders of fascism, Nazism and capitalism under various claims of biological imperative or, in the case of capitalism "freedom". As can be seen in the devolution of communist countries to mafia terror states, Marx's dictatorships of proletariats turn into such things with remarkable regularity. That's what the experiment run in real life shows. That's because that's what they always were, they just dropped the fancy talk and theory. Though, as in the case of such lefty venues as The Nation and In These Times proves, the old line lefties don't mind doing some of the propaganda work for the successors even as they push the old lines about old communists and communism. I suspect there have been payoffs, in the past and today.
No real left can be built on communism, it turns out to be what anyone should have suspected it would, horrible, grinding capitalist oppression instituted and carried out with more scientific precision and without any recognized moral inhibitions.
Marx and Engels and all the other theorists of communism sold their theories as being scientific in nature, as did the Nazis and fascists and many and various other ideologies that arose after the 17th century when science arose and became the most glamorous of intellectual framings. That means that when those theories are tested anyone looking at their claims has every right to judge them by the results, those who promote those theories as some aspect of science HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO JUDGE THE THEORIES ON THEIR OBSERVED RESULTS WHEN THEY ARE APPLIED.
The most salient fact of the application of Marx's theories of better governance is the fact that they have produced scores of millions of murders by the state and the state apparatus, the total and complete suppression of freedom, terror against the citizens of those countries, either of a low grade in which that terror took a general anxiety of surveillance and arrest, the witnessing of such arrests for what was said that did or might be construed to be against the ruling elite, or it might take the form it has during reigns of terror where public execution is witnessed regularly, in the cases of things like Mao's Cultural Revolution or the rule of the Kim dynasty in North Korea where they require grade school aged children to witness people being shot up on a regular basis - and that is those who aren't part of the massive, hereditary class of enslaved helots maintained by those governments.
It will be argued that it's unfair to note this because pure, clean Marxism has never been tried, as it can be argued that pure Christianity has never been tried. But the case that Christianity hasn't been tried is a lot better than that Marxism hasn't. You can easily point to the central commandments and claims of Jesus, the words of Paul and James and the others who defined the basis of Christianity in the Second Testament and prove that even the rule of Popes and "Christian Majesties(the very term is a self-contradiction) have repeatedly violated those basic principles of Christianity. I think the case that Marxist mass murder and suppression of rights is some violation of the gospel of Marx can't be sustained in a similar way. He envisioned communism, not in terms of democracy but in terms of a dictatorship allegedly of the working class, in itself an absurd idea. Dictatorships inevitably end up with a ruling criminal class elite, that is the observed nature of dictatorships.
I am not ashamed in my old age to have done what I should have done from the time I became aware of the nature of communism as it really is in the real world, I'm ashamed that I fell for the obscene notion that, somehow, the mass murders were "good" mass murders or at least to be unmentioned because the economic policy Marx espoused was so much better than that of capitalism. That is one of the most disgusting and obscene lines there is, it is exactly equivalent to fascists and Nazis discounting the murders that those ideologies, applied, inevitably produced in history. It is exactly the equivalent of what Marx saw and criticized in capitalism, the horrific and grinding oppression, the destruction of people and nature that is inherent in it, only on a far more accelerated time frame today from what he saw in the 19th century.
The most useful thing that Marxists in the post-war period had for gulling those who were gullible, as I was, were the anti-communists and their lies and excesses. But despising Red Channels, Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy, HUAC is no excuse for refusing to hold communism responsible for what communist governments did. While HUAC and Joe McCarthy were harassing a bunch of elite communists and their fellows here, depriving some Hollywood crap writers the right to have their names put on their scripts, the chance to earn fat salaries on the movies, and part of what they did that most people remember because, as RMJ pointed out here a while back, Hollywood likes to talk about Hollywood, people were being murdered, terrorized, deprived of every single right in every way by the very governments that the Hollywood 10, Bertold Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Corliss Lamont, etc. were supporting. Later on it was the "new left" of such things as the Maoist Progressive Labor Party who were breaking up the SDS as the Cultural Revolution was murdering millions. They're still romanticized by some older lefty magazine scribblers. And when those governments went after you, you were sent to concentration camps or killed. You know, exactly what Hitler would do to you if you said the wrong thing or were related to the wrong people.
That's what I'm ashamed of, that I fell for that line for a single second. I was never a Marxist or even much tempted to be one, mostly because I knew of those murders and that oppression, partly because I never really bought into the idea that sociology or history could be scientific. I'm ashamed that I was too much of a coward to say these things until I was in my fifties when I realized that someone murdered by communism was as dead and as murdered as someone murdered in a Nazi concentration camp or under the Italian invasion of Ethiopia or in the Japanese invasion of China or the Philippines. They are as dead as those murdered in the invasion and theft of the Americas or Australia, the dead under capitalism, those so casually murdered under the Victorian Poor Law.
Tell me why there is something good about the murders under communism and why the same claims can't be made by those who excuse the murders of fascism, Nazism and capitalism under various claims of biological imperative or, in the case of capitalism "freedom". As can be seen in the devolution of communist countries to mafia terror states, Marx's dictatorships of proletariats turn into such things with remarkable regularity. That's what the experiment run in real life shows. That's because that's what they always were, they just dropped the fancy talk and theory. Though, as in the case of such lefty venues as The Nation and In These Times proves, the old line lefties don't mind doing some of the propaganda work for the successors even as they push the old lines about old communists and communism. I suspect there have been payoffs, in the past and today.
No real left can be built on communism, it turns out to be what anyone should have suspected it would, horrible, grinding capitalist oppression instituted and carried out with more scientific precision and without any recognized moral inhibitions.
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Darwinism In Current Kulcha
The first thing I ever heard about Jordan Peterson was him espousing gender inequality on the basis of a the currently most popular expression of Darwinism, evolutionary psychology - Sociobiology by the most idiotic citation of reported gender roles in lobsters. I wrote about that at the time, pointing out that the exact same common ancestor we have with lobsters, believed to have lived 500,000,000 years ago, we also share with black widow spiders and preying mantis, in which the females not infrequently kill, they also eat males who want to mate with them.
Like virtually all phony "public intellectuals" in the modern English speaking people, they all seem eventually to try to hitch their wagons to Darwin's star. As I pointed out last week with Karl Pearson, when they do they inevitably do so to promote existing economic and social inequality, racial, ethnic, class, and gender inequality in support of the traditional and existing inequality. In Pearson's case, to pervert the meaning of socialism into its opposite.
I don't pay a lot of attention to someone who is as big a boob as Jordan Peterson but among his ephemeral and fleeting lines of crap which he sells to his ignorant angry boy fan base is complaining about that most Darwinian of all ideas, that there will be males who have more sex than other males, leading to an inequality in the number of offspring by those males. FOR FUCKSAKE, PETERSON, THAT'S WHAT DARWINISM IS ALL ABOUT. His fan base contains a large number of angry boys who are either involuntarily celibate because they're so unattractive that women won't have sex with them or who are so busy playing online, listening to their guru, Jordan, or grousing to their fellow celibates that women are unfair to them and how attractive guys are getting all the sex.
What's a phony like Jordan to do? He goes right ahead and depends on the ignorance and laziness of his fan base to not notice that and all of the other lapses of knowledge and logic that his act consists of.
So many examples of that are on display here.
I Am kind of surprised that Sam Seder and his crew didn't pick up more on the fact that with his performance on the Joe Rogan show, Peterson exposed himself as an ignorant and totally clownish phony who has never really read Darwin - something he shares with most of those who are neo-Darwinists, today and that his shtick is based in a pseudo-scientific melange of contradictions and lies geared to appeal to the ignorance, anger and stupidity of his fan boys.
I will go so far as to say, I don't think what he does is different in kind from what people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have made careers in "science" and philosophy through doing. But, from his base in the pseudo-science of University based psychology, he gets away with a lot more than Dawkins and Dennett have.
Like virtually all phony "public intellectuals" in the modern English speaking people, they all seem eventually to try to hitch their wagons to Darwin's star. As I pointed out last week with Karl Pearson, when they do they inevitably do so to promote existing economic and social inequality, racial, ethnic, class, and gender inequality in support of the traditional and existing inequality. In Pearson's case, to pervert the meaning of socialism into its opposite.
I don't pay a lot of attention to someone who is as big a boob as Jordan Peterson but among his ephemeral and fleeting lines of crap which he sells to his ignorant angry boy fan base is complaining about that most Darwinian of all ideas, that there will be males who have more sex than other males, leading to an inequality in the number of offspring by those males. FOR FUCKSAKE, PETERSON, THAT'S WHAT DARWINISM IS ALL ABOUT. His fan base contains a large number of angry boys who are either involuntarily celibate because they're so unattractive that women won't have sex with them or who are so busy playing online, listening to their guru, Jordan, or grousing to their fellow celibates that women are unfair to them and how attractive guys are getting all the sex.
What's a phony like Jordan to do? He goes right ahead and depends on the ignorance and laziness of his fan base to not notice that and all of the other lapses of knowledge and logic that his act consists of.
So many examples of that are on display here.
I Am kind of surprised that Sam Seder and his crew didn't pick up more on the fact that with his performance on the Joe Rogan show, Peterson exposed himself as an ignorant and totally clownish phony who has never really read Darwin - something he shares with most of those who are neo-Darwinists, today and that his shtick is based in a pseudo-scientific melange of contradictions and lies geared to appeal to the ignorance, anger and stupidity of his fan boys.
I will go so far as to say, I don't think what he does is different in kind from what people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have made careers in "science" and philosophy through doing. But, from his base in the pseudo-science of University based psychology, he gets away with a lot more than Dawkins and Dennett have.
Hate Mail - You Are The Fool For A Slogan And A Denier Of Reality
The idea that egalitarian democracy, those favoring egalitarian democracy against the moral atrocities of inequality and injustice are, out of some flaky notion of "fairness" required to allow even Nazis, even communists the ability to try to repeat here what they've done in Germany, Austria, the Soviet Union, China, Italy, Cambodia, North Korea, and in countries invaded and forced into the most malignant series of colonial occupations lasting hears and decades, is definitively discrediting of the free speech-free press industry and its patrons in the media.
Those lofty claims of principle, that "we must allow them to speak" really mean we must take the chance on them being able to do here what they did there, it is a pose made from a platform supported by the mountain of millions of the bodies of their victims, it is written in the blood of those who the beneficiaries of that flaky faux morality would see sacrificed so they can feel all pure and free-speechy about themselves, striking the cheapest of theatrical poses in the catalog of cheap theatrical poses and phony moralizing.
So, no, I'm not ashamed to have said what I did in that regard. A more relevant question is why you don't feel ashamed of advocating that we take a real chance on you being wrong and them succeeding in making it happen here. It's not as if we don't have examples of that happening here already, the KKK, lynch law, the legal apparatus that kept Jim Crow in place as the law of the land up till a very few years when it was fought back, only to be resurgent in the Republican-fascist takeover. The genocide of the native people of this continent, the various invasions, occupations and "interventions" such as people like Theodore Roosevelt believed in and engaged in, the eugenics permitted by the Supreme Court, the internment of citizens of the country under the Korematsu decision that John Roberts made a pose of nullifying even as he updated it on behalf of Trump's Muslim ban, . . .
I know most of you free-speechy types are white people, mostly affluent, in the professions, so you are unlikely to be the first victims of your bad gamble, those losses will be paid by people of color, people belonging to the already beleaguered minority groups who you would claim to champion when it's a different context. Poor people, most of all.
To the extent a white gay male who is in one of the groups slated for targeting by those whose ability to recruit and proselytize you champion as some kind of perversion of "principle" I can tell you on my behalf I'd rather you be honest and say you don't really mind all that much if they succeed in doing what they want to do to me. I certainly don't understand why any person of color would go along with you witnessing the resurgence of American apartheid, on both an official and a social level with the rise of Trump. That resurgence promoted primarily in the free press of cabloid TV and hate talk radio and internet fascism and Nazism and the white supremacy of those who cite evolutionary psychology and the such.
It not only can happen here, IT IS HAPPENING HERE, RIGHT NOW. You are a fool for a slogan and a denier of hard reality. In regard to what I said below, this morning, you are an idiot for cheap movie and TV plotting.
Egalitarian democracy, its proponents have every right to favor it over ideologies and other messages of inequality, they have every right to do everything they can to oppose and, yes, suppress fascism, Nazism and communism on the basis of the millions of victims they create when they gain power. There is no coherent moral argument against taking that possibility seriously instead of pretending it is a merely theoretical and so innocuous possibility.
Update: I thought I needed to expand that list of examples of how it not only can but has happened here, I could probably think of new examples every time I reread it for editing.
Those lofty claims of principle, that "we must allow them to speak" really mean we must take the chance on them being able to do here what they did there, it is a pose made from a platform supported by the mountain of millions of the bodies of their victims, it is written in the blood of those who the beneficiaries of that flaky faux morality would see sacrificed so they can feel all pure and free-speechy about themselves, striking the cheapest of theatrical poses in the catalog of cheap theatrical poses and phony moralizing.
So, no, I'm not ashamed to have said what I did in that regard. A more relevant question is why you don't feel ashamed of advocating that we take a real chance on you being wrong and them succeeding in making it happen here. It's not as if we don't have examples of that happening here already, the KKK, lynch law, the legal apparatus that kept Jim Crow in place as the law of the land up till a very few years when it was fought back, only to be resurgent in the Republican-fascist takeover. The genocide of the native people of this continent, the various invasions, occupations and "interventions" such as people like Theodore Roosevelt believed in and engaged in, the eugenics permitted by the Supreme Court, the internment of citizens of the country under the Korematsu decision that John Roberts made a pose of nullifying even as he updated it on behalf of Trump's Muslim ban, . . .
I know most of you free-speechy types are white people, mostly affluent, in the professions, so you are unlikely to be the first victims of your bad gamble, those losses will be paid by people of color, people belonging to the already beleaguered minority groups who you would claim to champion when it's a different context. Poor people, most of all.
To the extent a white gay male who is in one of the groups slated for targeting by those whose ability to recruit and proselytize you champion as some kind of perversion of "principle" I can tell you on my behalf I'd rather you be honest and say you don't really mind all that much if they succeed in doing what they want to do to me. I certainly don't understand why any person of color would go along with you witnessing the resurgence of American apartheid, on both an official and a social level with the rise of Trump. That resurgence promoted primarily in the free press of cabloid TV and hate talk radio and internet fascism and Nazism and the white supremacy of those who cite evolutionary psychology and the such.
It not only can happen here, IT IS HAPPENING HERE, RIGHT NOW. You are a fool for a slogan and a denier of hard reality. In regard to what I said below, this morning, you are an idiot for cheap movie and TV plotting.
Egalitarian democracy, its proponents have every right to favor it over ideologies and other messages of inequality, they have every right to do everything they can to oppose and, yes, suppress fascism, Nazism and communism on the basis of the millions of victims they create when they gain power. There is no coherent moral argument against taking that possibility seriously instead of pretending it is a merely theoretical and so innocuous possibility.
Update: I thought I needed to expand that list of examples of how it not only can but has happened here, I could probably think of new examples every time I reread it for editing.
John Roberts And His Colleagues On The Court Opened Us Up To Foreign Despots On Behalf Of Our Indigenous Criminal Class etc.
I have read it again this morning, the claim that there is some kind of mystery in why Donald Trump loves dictators and hates leaders of democratic (Canada, Germany) and quasi-democratic countries (Britain).
The reason Trump loves even the most brutal of dictators is the same reason Putin prefers to have dictators rule in the countries he's promoting fascism and neo-Nazism in, gangsters like doing business with gangsters, the truth, the rule of law, justice are not conducive to their maximum earning potential and their remaining on the top of the crime world.
It's the same reason that Republicans, especially those in the John Roberts Court, have destroyed any effective means of campaign finance reform for the purpose of protecting our elections from lies, the Citizens United majority in that case, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy (RATS+K) are the ones who, on behalf of the protogees of billionaires here and the "civil liberties" industry, opened up our elections system to even greater billionaire corruption and, as was warned at the time, foreign corporate corruption.
----------------------------
Mark Twain's quip that the indigenous criminal class in the United States was the Congress was only slightly but importantly off. The Congress was only the servant of the indigenous criminal class, as were and are the Supreme Court. The rich and powerful are the indigenous criminal class here as they are around the world. They are the foremost force that tries to control governments for corrupt and larcenous purposes. Mark Twain as a writer who, by that time, was rich and famous himself, knew he couldn't tell that truth directly, though he told more of it than many. He preferred, when he wrote a moral tale about everyday corruption, put it in terms of the relatively common people of his mythical Hadleyburg. Maybe he took that to be an allegory, using common folk as fabulists used animals, so as to stand for the corruption of wealth and the prospect of wealth. But it's one thing I've learned since reading the unedited thinking of so many college educated, even PhD'd folk, that if you want to tell the truth, those old literary forms of allegory, symbolism, etc. are stupid because you can't count on people seeing through the narrative to get to your point. The recent case where I found out that even when that's glaring people in the face, as in The Brothers Karamazov, they won't get it. You give people half a chance, a quarter of a chance, and they'll twist any allegory into meaning what they want it to mean, not into even an obvious meaning that they don't prefer.
And Americans don't read novels much, watching the movie instead.
It's even worse when they're supposed to learn history from movies and TV shows and plays. I wonder if any academic historian has ever made a survey of the handling of history in movies and plays and novels, concentrating on the most important of those for effect in swaying or toppling democracy, the ones with the biggest audiences. I suspect that if all of those popular venues for people getting what they believe is history were fact checked that it would be found that most of them were complete distortions of history and that just about none of them that purported to treat historical topics didn't contain glaring and significant lies and distortion of history, generally for either an ideological reason or, most damaging of all, to try to please an audience. When people get everything they know out of commercial crap like the movies, you can be sure that the "history" they get out of it will, as well, serve the purpose of those financing, producing, directing and writing the movies. As in the case of the movie Charlie Wilson's War, in which Tom Hanks reportedly demanded that they change some historical facts to make his character more likable, even the actors get a hand in lying about it.
Theater, movie "history" is inherently tied to audience appeal, not accuracy, not the truth.
If “Charlie Wilson’s War,” with a budget of $75 million, is a commercial success, its creators will have found a winning formula. You can make a movie that is relevant and intelligent — and palatable to a mass audience — if its political pills are sugar-coated, in this case thanks to Mr. Wilson’s high jinks, his sometime romance with a right-wing socialite played by Ms. Roberts and his escapades with a coarse C.I.A. officer played by Mr. Hoffman. But Hollywood has long found it tricky to find the balance between being taken seriously on geopolitics without falling short on what movies are supposed to do: entertain.
Mr. Sorkin elaborated: “There’s a vocabulary in movies that boozing is O.K., especially if the guy is going to kind of reform himself. That using cocaine, we’re never going to look past. That if we saw him snorting it, we’re no longer going to care about the Russians and the Afghans and the horror over there.”
Yet for all the horror, Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Nichols and Mr. Hanks — each a liberal Democrat — insist that their creation is, of all things, more a comedy than a political movie. “It’s a serious comedy,” Mr. Hanks said. “Funny stuff happens right next to horribly tragic stuff.”
Indeed there’s what Mr. Nichols calls “a Marx Brothers scene,” replete with slamming doors, as Mr. Hoffman’s character is repeatedly asked to leave Mr. Wilson’s office so he can deal with other crises. And who cannot chortle at how the office is stocked with statuesque beauty queens, known as Charlie’s Angels? Comedy or not, the spin from its creators is this: Don’t lump us with those box office disasters with ponderous Iraq-related messages.
One wonders how many people died, were maimed, were left bereaved, how many Afghanis, Americans, Canadians, citizens of the EU countries and the other allies that volunteered to fight on behalf of America in Afghanistan and, even more tragically, Iraqis, Syrians and others, since these Hollywood "liberals" made that comic treatment of the relevant history.
At a time when I would argue the standards of academic historical research and writing are higher than at any time in the history of historical writing, it's an incredible tragedy that a country, a world with more people with more degrees than ever in the history of the world would be turning to this kind of shit sausage factory for not only a cheap but a fatally dangerous substitute on the basis of it being more entertaining and so more salable.
No wonder democracy is in the crapper. It was put there by popular entertainment, even the "high end" of that.
The reason Trump loves even the most brutal of dictators is the same reason Putin prefers to have dictators rule in the countries he's promoting fascism and neo-Nazism in, gangsters like doing business with gangsters, the truth, the rule of law, justice are not conducive to their maximum earning potential and their remaining on the top of the crime world.
It's the same reason that Republicans, especially those in the John Roberts Court, have destroyed any effective means of campaign finance reform for the purpose of protecting our elections from lies, the Citizens United majority in that case, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy (RATS+K) are the ones who, on behalf of the protogees of billionaires here and the "civil liberties" industry, opened up our elections system to even greater billionaire corruption and, as was warned at the time, foreign corporate corruption.
----------------------------
Mark Twain's quip that the indigenous criminal class in the United States was the Congress was only slightly but importantly off. The Congress was only the servant of the indigenous criminal class, as were and are the Supreme Court. The rich and powerful are the indigenous criminal class here as they are around the world. They are the foremost force that tries to control governments for corrupt and larcenous purposes. Mark Twain as a writer who, by that time, was rich and famous himself, knew he couldn't tell that truth directly, though he told more of it than many. He preferred, when he wrote a moral tale about everyday corruption, put it in terms of the relatively common people of his mythical Hadleyburg. Maybe he took that to be an allegory, using common folk as fabulists used animals, so as to stand for the corruption of wealth and the prospect of wealth. But it's one thing I've learned since reading the unedited thinking of so many college educated, even PhD'd folk, that if you want to tell the truth, those old literary forms of allegory, symbolism, etc. are stupid because you can't count on people seeing through the narrative to get to your point. The recent case where I found out that even when that's glaring people in the face, as in The Brothers Karamazov, they won't get it. You give people half a chance, a quarter of a chance, and they'll twist any allegory into meaning what they want it to mean, not into even an obvious meaning that they don't prefer.
And Americans don't read novels much, watching the movie instead.
It's even worse when they're supposed to learn history from movies and TV shows and plays. I wonder if any academic historian has ever made a survey of the handling of history in movies and plays and novels, concentrating on the most important of those for effect in swaying or toppling democracy, the ones with the biggest audiences. I suspect that if all of those popular venues for people getting what they believe is history were fact checked that it would be found that most of them were complete distortions of history and that just about none of them that purported to treat historical topics didn't contain glaring and significant lies and distortion of history, generally for either an ideological reason or, most damaging of all, to try to please an audience. When people get everything they know out of commercial crap like the movies, you can be sure that the "history" they get out of it will, as well, serve the purpose of those financing, producing, directing and writing the movies. As in the case of the movie Charlie Wilson's War, in which Tom Hanks reportedly demanded that they change some historical facts to make his character more likable, even the actors get a hand in lying about it.
Theater, movie "history" is inherently tied to audience appeal, not accuracy, not the truth.
If “Charlie Wilson’s War,” with a budget of $75 million, is a commercial success, its creators will have found a winning formula. You can make a movie that is relevant and intelligent — and palatable to a mass audience — if its political pills are sugar-coated, in this case thanks to Mr. Wilson’s high jinks, his sometime romance with a right-wing socialite played by Ms. Roberts and his escapades with a coarse C.I.A. officer played by Mr. Hoffman. But Hollywood has long found it tricky to find the balance between being taken seriously on geopolitics without falling short on what movies are supposed to do: entertain.
Mr. Sorkin elaborated: “There’s a vocabulary in movies that boozing is O.K., especially if the guy is going to kind of reform himself. That using cocaine, we’re never going to look past. That if we saw him snorting it, we’re no longer going to care about the Russians and the Afghans and the horror over there.”
Yet for all the horror, Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Nichols and Mr. Hanks — each a liberal Democrat — insist that their creation is, of all things, more a comedy than a political movie. “It’s a serious comedy,” Mr. Hanks said. “Funny stuff happens right next to horribly tragic stuff.”
Indeed there’s what Mr. Nichols calls “a Marx Brothers scene,” replete with slamming doors, as Mr. Hoffman’s character is repeatedly asked to leave Mr. Wilson’s office so he can deal with other crises. And who cannot chortle at how the office is stocked with statuesque beauty queens, known as Charlie’s Angels? Comedy or not, the spin from its creators is this: Don’t lump us with those box office disasters with ponderous Iraq-related messages.
One wonders how many people died, were maimed, were left bereaved, how many Afghanis, Americans, Canadians, citizens of the EU countries and the other allies that volunteered to fight on behalf of America in Afghanistan and, even more tragically, Iraqis, Syrians and others, since these Hollywood "liberals" made that comic treatment of the relevant history.
At a time when I would argue the standards of academic historical research and writing are higher than at any time in the history of historical writing, it's an incredible tragedy that a country, a world with more people with more degrees than ever in the history of the world would be turning to this kind of shit sausage factory for not only a cheap but a fatally dangerous substitute on the basis of it being more entertaining and so more salable.
No wonder democracy is in the crapper. It was put there by popular entertainment, even the "high end" of that.
Saturday, July 14, 2018
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way - Two Episodes
David LeReaney, Sergeant Mann
Grant Linneberg, Detective Donaldson.
Cast: John Wright; Shawna Burnett; Andy Maton;
Chris Hunt.
Natasha Girgis; Mark Lawes; Rod Padmos
I notice the Youtubes of The Sensitive I posted last week have already been taken down, one of the hazards of posting Youtubes, any links, actually. Sorry about that.
How We Find Ourselves Living Through The Destruction Of American Democracy
I think it's fair to say that Russia is a country, the Russian People are a people under the anti-democratic control of organized criminals. Like the United States under the control of organized criminals who are destroying democratic institutions here, there is some blame for that among Russians who were duped by the organized criminals, but there are large numbers, maybe even a majority of Russians who are innocent of guilt.
That's the reason that when I'm talking about the mafia state that controls Russian, which is in collusion with Donald Trump and many American billionaires, billionaires based in other countries, I don't fault Russia, I try to always remember to make the distinction that it's Putin and the criminal oligarchs who are doing all of these things. I look at the biographies and histories of most of those people and find they were part of the previous oligarchic mafia that ruled the Soviet Union, looking into that, studying it, considering it has led me to my belief that the only realistic view of those anti-democratic systems is that they are all mafia states, their claimed ideologies and ideological motives about as meaningful to the organized criminal-dictatorial regimes as the alleged Catholicism of the Sicilian Mafia, the pseudo-Christianity of so many in the American equivalent of the Putin crime regime, the "Americanism" of so many of the rest who have, for decades, undermined American democracy to the point where it is now in control of a man who is a puppet of Putin based on his acceptance of Russian oligarchic funding of his gross and grotesque love of the most vulgar of Las Vegas, NYC "good life". The millions of dollars they gave to Trump and his corrupt family were the best investments that loan sharks have ever made on a loser, they got them direct access to control of the United States.
I will give Putin this, he and his crime family have brilliantly taken advantage of every defect in the United States Constitution, every one we have allowed corrupt Supreme Courts to open up in it, going back into the 19th century to impose on us on behalf of robber barons and white supremacists. But it wasn't only officially conservative figures who gave Putin what he used, the pseudo-liberals of the media, their hired legal hacks who invented "free speech" absolutism gave them and what is now their American allies, the corrupt billionaire oligarchs the means to corrupt millions and millions of Americans through the mass media. Even before the foreign dictator Putin swayed an American presidential election, the Reagan administration admitted Rupert Murdoch, a foreign soft-porn king who had done so much to corrupt British politics through his media empire with the obvious intent that he do here what he did in Australia and Britain.
The fact is, our system has been wide open to the same kind of billionaire manipulation and corruption of democracy for a lot longer than Putin has been alive. That weakness which Putin and his mafia organization identified and exploited has long been exploited by the rich and powerful here, it has promoted every malignant thing in American politics through the media of the day. When that media were newspapers and organizations and in-person speeches, it was enough to cause all kinds of evil, when the electronic media, radio was invented, it was obvious that when the audience was hundreds of thousands and then millions listening on a network, the danger of lies and playing on peoples' worst weakness became much much greater .
The legal system, lawyers, the courts, the Supreme Court pretended that the language of the First Amendment written in the 18th century was up to addressing the situation AND PROTECTING THE COUNTRY FROM THAT NEW DANGEROUS POTENTIAL OF THE UNIMPEDED MASS MEDIA IN THE CONTROL OF MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES. They are one of the most useful of those tools that Putin used because those tools were always at the service of American millionaires and billionaires. And, peoples' weakness being what it is, the excitement of titillating lies and the fast food of paranoia and envy, the regime of "free speech - free press" they erected in the 20th century was bound to serve the purpose of those with a motive and desire to sell them the worst ideas and encourage them to do the worst things.
Some people wonder why I have gone on about these things so often. All you have to do is look at the means that Putin used to gull Americans into voting for Trump, against their interest, against what is the best about us, he used the media, the most recent form of it. the least controlled form of it, the "social media." He used free speech and free press to ratfuck our election to destroy democracy. What he did was done by Rupert Murdoch through FOX, by Sinclair, through smaller networks and media corporations on behalf of the same Republicans who are preventing any effective restrictions on Donald Trump in office, on behalf of Donald Trump. He controlled news cycles in even responsible media through exploiting their commercial necessity of focusing on the every Tweet of Trump, every titillating anti-Hillary line they introduced. They understood the addictions of the American media a lot better than America's journalists do. They are doing it under the legal rules the Supreme Court has given us, the system of permitting the media to lie with impunity and the Supreme Court using the excuses of "free speech and free press" to knock down every attempt that the Congress in the past and state legislatures have tried to prevent the very corruption of our political system through the dissemination of lies in political messages on TV, the radio, in print and now on the internet.
We allowed the dangerously truncated words of the First Amendment to be interpreted in such a way that they destroy any real democracy, to turn it into an anti-democratic slogan which has worked entirely better for Republican-fascism which serves billionaire oligarchs here and, under Citizens United and other rulings, opened us up to the direct and skilled attack by the Putin mafia state. That tool was given to him by the ACLU, such legal hacks as Joel Gura, various members of the Supreme Court of the United States, going back to the "free speech" rulings of Holmes and Brandeis. That was given to him by members of the media who had a direct professional and financial interest in having the privilege of not fact checking what they said, of getting away with lying, if not for them then for their professional colleagues.
That's how this happened.
Friday, July 13, 2018
J.S. Bach - BWV 639 - Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ
Wolfgang Zerer, organ
Update: BWV 600 - Gott durch deine Güte
Stupid Mail
No, I don't dismiss it because humor dates, I dismiss it because it's stupid and puerile and fails to be funny.
If I didn't already know the answer I'd pose the obvious question, "Are you 12?"
If I didn't already know the answer I'd pose the obvious question, "Are you 12?"
This Is Your Brain On Hg and Politicians Should Always Be Treated With The Same Rules They Set For Others
Listening to the clip of Rep. Paul Gosa, claiming that he could read Peter Strzok's mind because he's a dentist reminded me of the dentist who went to school with my mother and who ended his days in a state of dementia brought on by decades of sloppy handling of mercury in his office. They said that when he died the guy who took over his practice had to have the office thoroughly scrubbed for mercury, there was so much of it around.
Does he do all of the dentistry for the Republican caucus in the House or just those two committees? If you want to consider the possibility, Charles Pierce did a rogues gallery of the goons on display during the hearing. It's too long to copy and paste, but you can see it here.
Anyone in the media who presents the Republican Party as anything except a collection of the totally corrupt, the totally loony, the congenitally stupid is part of the collusion with their billionaire owners.
----------------------------
I am particularly interested in how the growing scandal surrounding Jim Jordan's complicity in a years long gay sexual harassment ring at Ohio State is developing. But that's not the word, it was more like a systematic practice, apparently known by anyone involved in the wrestling program Jim Jordan worked in that it was going on. Considering what was said in the hearing yesterday, what they allowed Louis Gohmert to say, I'd say everything about that is fair game from now on. Jim Jordan is as guilty as Roger Ailes was, maybe more so. There had to be some motive in letting it go on for years. Considering what Trey Gowdy has been doing over the past several years, I don't think any speculation should be held back. I'm entirely in favor of politicians being treated by the same rules they use.
Does he do all of the dentistry for the Republican caucus in the House or just those two committees? If you want to consider the possibility, Charles Pierce did a rogues gallery of the goons on display during the hearing. It's too long to copy and paste, but you can see it here.
Anyone in the media who presents the Republican Party as anything except a collection of the totally corrupt, the totally loony, the congenitally stupid is part of the collusion with their billionaire owners.
----------------------------
I am particularly interested in how the growing scandal surrounding Jim Jordan's complicity in a years long gay sexual harassment ring at Ohio State is developing. But that's not the word, it was more like a systematic practice, apparently known by anyone involved in the wrestling program Jim Jordan worked in that it was going on. Considering what was said in the hearing yesterday, what they allowed Louis Gohmert to say, I'd say everything about that is fair game from now on. Jim Jordan is as guilty as Roger Ailes was, maybe more so. There had to be some motive in letting it go on for years. Considering what Trey Gowdy has been doing over the past several years, I don't think any speculation should be held back. I'm entirely in favor of politicians being treated by the same rules they use.
Abolishing Billionaires And Multi Millionaires Would Do More To Protect Democracy Than Just About Anything Else
Yesterday's outrageous show trial by two House committees under the control of thugs proves that government by the hirelings of even American billionaires will end up, inevitably, turning the Congress into a den of traitors. Trey Gowdy, Bob Goodlatte, the mentally defective Louis Gohmert, and the rest of the Republican thugs prove that while Trump is a fully owned asset of the Putin crime family, the Republicans in Congress are owned by Putin's American associates.
I wonder if even with this display of Putin collusion by the Republican caucus in the House will lead people to admit that our domestic billionaires have no sense of patriotic duty or a sense of obligation to the United States, the People of the United States, our allies who have shed their blood on our behalf, etc. It's obvious that the billionaires who put a lot of these thugs in office, Murdoch, the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelson own the likes of Gowdy, Goodlatte and Gohmert, not to mention Paul Ryan and Jim Jordan, when you see them in action you are seeing the will of those billionaires being put into effect by the government of the United States.
That American billionaires and those like Rupert Murdoch who came here to corrupt the United States happen to have legal citizenship doesn't make them any less dangerous to American democracy or even American security than billionaires who speak Russian or are part of the Chinese mafia establishment. While a few, like Sheldon Adelson makes some kind of pose of dedication to Israel (from what I understand, lots of Israeli's don't welcome his malign influence there) or perhaps his fiefdom in whore houses and gambling dens in Macow and other Pacific venues, none of the billionaire patrons of the Republican Party seems to have any feeling of loyalty or obligation to American democracy.
As I've been mentioning over the past few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that falling for the pretense that the great struggle for democracy has been against anti-democratic ideologies was a smoke screen. All of them, the Nazis, the fascists, the communists were first, foremost and last gangsters who exercised power to steal stuff and land and enslave people. That is how the Soviet Union turned seamlessly into what developed into the Putin crime family, the Maoist dictatorship into China's Victorian capitalism on steroids as communism, all in the hands of a class of billionaires largely formerly members of the communist establishment.
The existence of billionaires is the greatest danger to democracy, certainly the greatest danger to egalitarian democracy. While I'm sure you could identify billionaires who haven't been, some who seem to favor democracy over oligarchy, they are more than made up for by those who aren't only ready to sell us out to their fellow billionaires in other countries, they already own the Congress and the Executive and are about to have bought themselves the Supreme Court, too.
And I'm not that impressed with the record of the most allegedly pro-democracy of billionaires. George Soros has been making all kinds of noise and spending money for "civil society" for a long time and look at the results, no time since 1945 has there been a greater danger from fascism in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The Hungarian fascist leader Viktor Orban, who is kicking Soros' Open Society group out of Hungary was someone Soros nurtured, financing his study in Britain. I would like to know exactly how "Open Society" has worked to counter the promotion of fascism by the Putin and other billionaire organized criminals because I'd like to know just where it's alleged to have worked. I don't have any confidence in his judgement and as he doesn't seem to be changing direction, I'm not confident in his actual intentions.
With the explosion in the number of billionaires, with the hoarding of such a huge majority of the wealth of the world into a tiny percentage of the world's population has come a decline in the material well-being of people which softens up people for the appeals of fascism and neo-Nazism, communists having pretty much given up any pretense of socialism in favor of ultra-capitalism, which turns out to also be a mafia style of economics. I don't think anything but squeezing the hoarded wealth out of billionaires will do it. Which won't be easy, among other things the civil liberties industry which has so many liberals hoodwinked will fight against economic justice and equality under law on the basis of "freedom". As I've also pointed out many times, they have had a large role in producing this catastrophe in the United States.
I wonder if even with this display of Putin collusion by the Republican caucus in the House will lead people to admit that our domestic billionaires have no sense of patriotic duty or a sense of obligation to the United States, the People of the United States, our allies who have shed their blood on our behalf, etc. It's obvious that the billionaires who put a lot of these thugs in office, Murdoch, the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelson own the likes of Gowdy, Goodlatte and Gohmert, not to mention Paul Ryan and Jim Jordan, when you see them in action you are seeing the will of those billionaires being put into effect by the government of the United States.
That American billionaires and those like Rupert Murdoch who came here to corrupt the United States happen to have legal citizenship doesn't make them any less dangerous to American democracy or even American security than billionaires who speak Russian or are part of the Chinese mafia establishment. While a few, like Sheldon Adelson makes some kind of pose of dedication to Israel (from what I understand, lots of Israeli's don't welcome his malign influence there) or perhaps his fiefdom in whore houses and gambling dens in Macow and other Pacific venues, none of the billionaire patrons of the Republican Party seems to have any feeling of loyalty or obligation to American democracy.
As I've been mentioning over the past few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that falling for the pretense that the great struggle for democracy has been against anti-democratic ideologies was a smoke screen. All of them, the Nazis, the fascists, the communists were first, foremost and last gangsters who exercised power to steal stuff and land and enslave people. That is how the Soviet Union turned seamlessly into what developed into the Putin crime family, the Maoist dictatorship into China's Victorian capitalism on steroids as communism, all in the hands of a class of billionaires largely formerly members of the communist establishment.
The existence of billionaires is the greatest danger to democracy, certainly the greatest danger to egalitarian democracy. While I'm sure you could identify billionaires who haven't been, some who seem to favor democracy over oligarchy, they are more than made up for by those who aren't only ready to sell us out to their fellow billionaires in other countries, they already own the Congress and the Executive and are about to have bought themselves the Supreme Court, too.
And I'm not that impressed with the record of the most allegedly pro-democracy of billionaires. George Soros has been making all kinds of noise and spending money for "civil society" for a long time and look at the results, no time since 1945 has there been a greater danger from fascism in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The Hungarian fascist leader Viktor Orban, who is kicking Soros' Open Society group out of Hungary was someone Soros nurtured, financing his study in Britain. I would like to know exactly how "Open Society" has worked to counter the promotion of fascism by the Putin and other billionaire organized criminals because I'd like to know just where it's alleged to have worked. I don't have any confidence in his judgement and as he doesn't seem to be changing direction, I'm not confident in his actual intentions.
With the explosion in the number of billionaires, with the hoarding of such a huge majority of the wealth of the world into a tiny percentage of the world's population has come a decline in the material well-being of people which softens up people for the appeals of fascism and neo-Nazism, communists having pretty much given up any pretense of socialism in favor of ultra-capitalism, which turns out to also be a mafia style of economics. I don't think anything but squeezing the hoarded wealth out of billionaires will do it. Which won't be easy, among other things the civil liberties industry which has so many liberals hoodwinked will fight against economic justice and equality under law on the basis of "freedom". As I've also pointed out many times, they have had a large role in producing this catastrophe in the United States.
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Checking In On The Inquisition of Peter Strzok
The headlines that come up on Google inform me that those of The Federalist (fascist) say that tower of moral integrity and supporter of Donald "I grab them by the pussy" Trump, Louis Gohmert said that because Strzok committed adultery that he's not credible.
I'd love to see Gohmert under oath being asked about his marital fideltity.
The Federalist (fascist) explicitly misrepresents what Strzok said, he said that he didn't say he as an FBI agent would "stop" Trump but when Trump did things like mock a Gold Star family he didn't think the American People would ever put someone like that in office. And as Trump got in while losing the election, his wishes were right, though thwarted by the corrupt Constitutional system that allows that to happen.
I fucking hate the Federalists (fascists).
I'd love to see Gohmert under oath being asked about his marital fideltity.
The Federalist (fascist) explicitly misrepresents what Strzok said, he said that he didn't say he as an FBI agent would "stop" Trump but when Trump did things like mock a Gold Star family he didn't think the American People would ever put someone like that in office. And as Trump got in while losing the election, his wishes were right, though thwarted by the corrupt Constitutional system that allows that to happen.
I fucking hate the Federalists (fascists).
From The Guardian Through the Estimable Charles Pierce, Here Is what
Harvard Fellow, Pathological Liar, Hedge Hider, Sean Spiecer Says In His Upcoming (my lunch almost came up when I read it) Book
“I don’t think we will ever again see a candidate like Donald Trump,” Spicer writes. “His high-wire act is one that few could ever follow. He is a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow. His verbal bluntness involves risks that few candidates would dare take. His ability to pivot from a seemingly career-ending moment to a furious assault on his opponents is a talent few politicians can muster.”
“I don’t think we will ever again see a candidate like Donald Trump,” Spicer writes. “His high-wire act is one that few could ever follow. He is a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow. His verbal bluntness involves risks that few candidates would dare take. His ability to pivot from a seemingly career-ending moment to a furious assault on his opponents is a talent few politicians can muster.”
A Response - Just Off The Top Of My Head
The first people to set up a society on the basis of community of goods in America, indeed in the whole world, were the so-called Shakers.
Karl Marx
What the member of the rump remnant at Eschaton said, minus what was said about me, was " the American Christian religion and the corrupt capitalist patriarchy it was constructed to serve would lead to amoral depravity."
Considering how much atheists and "secularists" love to claim that the Founding Fathers who set up the Constitution were anything but Christians - something I actually wouldn't necessarily disagree with, if by Christian you mean fidelity to the Gospel, the Epistles of Paul, the Acts of the Apostles - it's rather funny that they, when convenient, pretend they didn't say that.
Considering that Karl Marx said the Shakers were pretty much the first actual socialistic society, something which the old time Shakers would probably have agreed with, a Christian community which was based on the testimonies and prophesy of Ann Lee, which, from the very beginning had women leaders as well as male leaders, the comment is particularly stupid.
I am not sure where "Gummo" could have gotten such an ahistorical and stupid idea, though I suspect its genesis is probably from some European like Max Weber or some American idiot who read what he said and didn't bother to fact check, or the same third or fourth hand. This paper about the history of Christian Socialism in America by John Spargo notes that when European socialists reported back home on the phenomenon of Christian socialism here, European socialists were amazed because it was at variance with their theories and experience of European socialism.
I have noted before that the most successful socialist in the history of North America was the Baptist minister Tommy Douglas and that probably what might count as an even earlier experiment with something like socialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the longest lasting, to date might be the Jesuit Reduction in Paraguay.
Maybe I'll go into this more sometime but it's my experience that English speaking college educated snobs are influenced by old fashioned, polemical sources like Weber and those who built on their distortions without ever bothering to look at the primary material. Spargo's paper notes that in Europe the rise of "modern socialism" is a by-product of Darwinism, something which even a casual reading of Darwin and especially writings by Ernst Haeckel, especially his book, Freie wissenschaft und freie lehre that Darwin endorsed, fully, would have noted what is obvious, that natural selection is entirely at odds with not only democracy but, especially any democratic socialism. Any socialism that is built on Darwinism is an inevitable destruction of genuine socialism and is bound to turn into a horrific nightmare, as happened to the perhaps fatal damaging of the word "socialism".
In his entirely putrid book, The Chance of Death And Other Essays In Evolution, Karl Pearson, mentioned in my morning post, he goes into how, despite what Haeckel said about that in the book which Charles Darwin endorsed, wholeheartedly, in his anti-democratic, top-down controlled, you might even say proto-Leninist-Stalinist view of socialism, the control necessary to impose what he believed would be a restored replacement for "natural inequality" was possible [See: Volume 1: Socialism and Natural Selection] whereas it would be impossible under democracy. Pearson's was the socialism of the atheist, hostile to religion, certainly hostile to Christianity, Fabianism, which while nominally feminist was feminist only on behalf of those they deemed the best and the brightest. A socialism in which, as Marilyn Robinson has pointed out, the Fabians "those most sedulous of strainers of mercy" in their tracts and sociological study always couched the most stingy of "relief," reducing the poor to the most deprived and desperate margin of bare, perhaps less, subsistence into the greater goal,ensuring their social utility, their exploitation by industry and other profit making ventures. I've read Karl Pearson's scientific, Darwinist version of that and he explicitly calls for measures that ensure that lots of them would die in childbirth, both mothers and children on the basis of aiding that culling, what he calls "socialism".
As I said, I could go on but I've got chores to get to this morning and this is just what I can give you off the top of my head.
Karl Marx
What the member of the rump remnant at Eschaton said, minus what was said about me, was " the American Christian religion and the corrupt capitalist patriarchy it was constructed to serve would lead to amoral depravity."
Considering how much atheists and "secularists" love to claim that the Founding Fathers who set up the Constitution were anything but Christians - something I actually wouldn't necessarily disagree with, if by Christian you mean fidelity to the Gospel, the Epistles of Paul, the Acts of the Apostles - it's rather funny that they, when convenient, pretend they didn't say that.
Considering that Karl Marx said the Shakers were pretty much the first actual socialistic society, something which the old time Shakers would probably have agreed with, a Christian community which was based on the testimonies and prophesy of Ann Lee, which, from the very beginning had women leaders as well as male leaders, the comment is particularly stupid.
I am not sure where "Gummo" could have gotten such an ahistorical and stupid idea, though I suspect its genesis is probably from some European like Max Weber or some American idiot who read what he said and didn't bother to fact check, or the same third or fourth hand. This paper about the history of Christian Socialism in America by John Spargo notes that when European socialists reported back home on the phenomenon of Christian socialism here, European socialists were amazed because it was at variance with their theories and experience of European socialism.
I have noted before that the most successful socialist in the history of North America was the Baptist minister Tommy Douglas and that probably what might count as an even earlier experiment with something like socialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the longest lasting, to date might be the Jesuit Reduction in Paraguay.
Maybe I'll go into this more sometime but it's my experience that English speaking college educated snobs are influenced by old fashioned, polemical sources like Weber and those who built on their distortions without ever bothering to look at the primary material. Spargo's paper notes that in Europe the rise of "modern socialism" is a by-product of Darwinism, something which even a casual reading of Darwin and especially writings by Ernst Haeckel, especially his book, Freie wissenschaft und freie lehre that Darwin endorsed, fully, would have noted what is obvious, that natural selection is entirely at odds with not only democracy but, especially any democratic socialism. Any socialism that is built on Darwinism is an inevitable destruction of genuine socialism and is bound to turn into a horrific nightmare, as happened to the perhaps fatal damaging of the word "socialism".
In his entirely putrid book, The Chance of Death And Other Essays In Evolution, Karl Pearson, mentioned in my morning post, he goes into how, despite what Haeckel said about that in the book which Charles Darwin endorsed, wholeheartedly, in his anti-democratic, top-down controlled, you might even say proto-Leninist-Stalinist view of socialism, the control necessary to impose what he believed would be a restored replacement for "natural inequality" was possible [See: Volume 1: Socialism and Natural Selection] whereas it would be impossible under democracy. Pearson's was the socialism of the atheist, hostile to religion, certainly hostile to Christianity, Fabianism, which while nominally feminist was feminist only on behalf of those they deemed the best and the brightest. A socialism in which, as Marilyn Robinson has pointed out, the Fabians "those most sedulous of strainers of mercy" in their tracts and sociological study always couched the most stingy of "relief," reducing the poor to the most deprived and desperate margin of bare, perhaps less, subsistence into the greater goal,ensuring their social utility, their exploitation by industry and other profit making ventures. I've read Karl Pearson's scientific, Darwinist version of that and he explicitly calls for measures that ensure that lots of them would die in childbirth, both mothers and children on the basis of aiding that culling, what he calls "socialism".
As I said, I could go on but I've got chores to get to this morning and this is just what I can give you off the top of my head.
Stupid Mail - Why I Will Not Address Simplistic Stupidity
By chance, I happened across this talk by Susannah Heschel yesterday, the day after I was forced to the conclusion that a man I thought was pig-ignorant and stupid through his own laziness, as well as morally deficient was that way because he's just not smart and was obviously brought up not to value the truth.
If you listen to the video, I should tell you that the two intros are longish and unclear but once Susannah Heschel starts to talk her voice is entirely clear.
Update: Maybe "Gummo" should come here and say that and I'll respond. I don't believe that coward ever came here to read what I said, never mind to challenge it.
When Simps says I get "pissy" I think it means I mopped the floor with him.
Believing what she said about the moral problems of respecting even the dignity of those who choose to not have any, themselves, I'm going to have to work out whether or not I can, in good conscience, address the stupidity of Simels. I will, though, have no problem with addressing his lies about what I say.
If you listen to the video, I should tell you that the two intros are longish and unclear but once Susannah Heschel starts to talk her voice is entirely clear.
Update: Maybe "Gummo" should come here and say that and I'll respond. I don't believe that coward ever came here to read what I said, never mind to challenge it.
When Simps says I get "pissy" I think it means I mopped the floor with him.
Hate Mail - It Wasn't Reading Religion That Convinced Me That Materialist-Atheism Inevitably Destroyed Morality, It Was Reading Atheists
I can't tell you when I first came to suspect that materialism and the atheism that ideology was constructed to serve would lead to amoral depravity. I suspect it might have been while reading one American atheist psychologist or sociologist or "ethicist". I can tell you what the final nail in that coffin was, it was the blog The Atheist Ethicist * in which one Alonzo Fyfe was and, I'm kind of surprised to find, is still trying to find some kind of artificial atheist substitution for morality in his own, apparently going-nowhere interpretation of that old, rather obviously stupid atheist attempt to do the same in 18th century British utilitarianism. The rather glaring moral problems in the idea that morality is defined by "the greatest happiness to the greatest number" has been known for a very long time. Among those are:
1. The idea that we could possibly determine "the greater happiness" never mind determining the number of people that would make happy, is pretty much absurd on its face.
2. The idea that we have the foresight to determine the ultimate or even future results of things that make people happy now which might turn sour and cause enormous unhappiness to even more people, perhaps all people, requires giving people, now, super-human powers that they obviously don't have.
3. The idea that we can determine the ranking of causes of happiness and unhappiness on that kind of scale is absurd. There have been proponents of utilitarianism who, when confronted with such ideas of whether or not murdering every last Jew in the world would lead to the happiness of all of the survivors, have been forced on the power of their utilitarian creed, to float the idea that such a type of thing would have to be determined to be right.
I haven't seen anything in any articulation of utilitarianism that has gotten past any of the problems with it, I think the intellectual tergiversations that Fyfe has gone through for his "desire utilitarianism" and Peter Singer for his bizarre articulations of it which, while vastly popular among atheists seems to center on that most exciting thing about what has pervertedly been called "ethics" in university philosophy departments, drawing up lists of people it's not only OK to murder, but who should be murdered. I certainly don't see any of the various species of utilitarianism going back to Bentham and John Stuart Mills which doesn't take the "question of evil" atheists throw up against God and greatly exacerbate it by advocating godly powers to make decisions like that among human beings. No doubt led by university trained "ethicists".
A lot of very smart people, going back centuries, now, have tried to find an atheist, materialist, "scientific" replacement for morality, mostly the morality articulated by the Jewish-Christian scriptures and all I see is it getting worse and more depraved. I think in Peter Singer we can attribute a lot of that increase in depravity to his and other such utilitarians and "ethicists" desire to pretend you can latch onto the repute of Darwin to give persuasive "scientific" force to their efforts. But as I've spent scores of posts to documenting in the word of Darwin and his appointed followers, Darwinism is morally depraved, inevitably, because natural selection is about grading organisms, including human beings according to some notion of "fitness" and cutting them and their possible or real offspring from the future, through involuntary sterilization in the more "humane" versions of that but, ususally, getting to the murder of millions, tens of millions, and not putting out of consideration the murders of hundreds of millions of people.
Atheism has produced depravities in intellectual thought, into academic life, introduced such depravities into polite consideration that more than match anything you can throw out in the long history of Christianity or Judaism or even the "historical" books of the Old Testament. Considering they're talking about murdering people, infants, others, I have never heard much in the way of proportionate or sufficiently strong atheist academic or even the NPR-Fresh Air level** criticism of a Peter Singer who are, after all, calling for the murders of infants or such utilitarians who contemplate the moral rightness of murdering all of any ethnic group for the "ultimate happiness" of more people that would be murdered in such a utilitarian fantasy. Consider the virtual non-existence of that among polite society, especially among those people who will point to the stories in Joshua or other books of the Old Testament identifying them as conclusive evidence of the depravity of all religion and its danger to the world, today. Those killings in Canaan might or might not be a report of history, the moral nature of them have been debated repeatedly because they are at variance with the morality of the Commandments of Judaism and the Gospel of Jesus. Get back to me when atheists spend anywhere near as much time debating the morality of Darwin's theory as even he contemplated it being applied to the human species, something the Nazis and eugenicists actually did do in living historical memory. Consider that especially in light of the revival of eugenics talk which has gone from science and academia into the popular press, our politics and the courts.
I think it's gone on long enough so that we can be fairly certain that whenever materialist-atheist philosophers or "ethicists" are confronted with these questions, eventually they'll come around to drawing up a list of who we can or, eventually, should kill.
I don't think today's or atheists in the future will be any more clever than those of the past. Their prescriptions for lesser problems of morality than who should we murder are generally not much less problematic.
I would invite you to look at the mental gyrations and gymnastics that Alonzo Fyfe has to go through in his seemingly futile articulation of his basis for morality and ask yourself how any such attempt is supposed to work among everyday people who will certainly never even hear the word "utilitarian" in the governance of their lives, how they are supposed to make those calculations of which goods are "greater" which will result in the greater happiness to "greater numbers" than the number of those who will be entirely unhappy with it. Ask yourself how comfortable you would be having that being the basis of actions by Congress, the Senate, the Executive branch or the morally depraved Supreme Court, of them having that as the basis of their deliberations and decisions. I ask you that, especially, considering the universe of concern of the Republican Party today, when they have rigged elections that put them in control even when they have fewer votes than their opponents.
Atheism doesn't work, materialism doesn't work except to produce depravity. I think what we see in Putin's criminal state is what you can expect will be the eventual outcome of those, no morality at all.***
* Thinking about it as I'm writing this, I think for Fyfe, as for virtually all of the atheist "ethicists" the "ethics" aren't their primary concern, it's the promotion of atheism. I think that's a primary motive that is shared by a lot of people in academia, even in the sciences. I think that accounts for how some of them could say some of the most amorally depraved things and not bat can eyelash, because they are smart enough to know such depravity is a logical inevitability in their promotion of atheism and materialism. There is no way to get by the fact that materialism inevitably demotes human beings to the status of objects which have no rights and no moral obligations. Eventually, every atheist system of "morality" will be reduced to that status, it's inescapable based in that hard fact of what materialism is.
** I think they're too polite to really push it, they don't want to appear uncivil to those who advocate murder under the wing of academia and intellectual repute, or they don't want to be unfashionably concerned with such moral questions. They might be considered unfashionably unscientific and "objective" if they called it what it is, obvious amoral depravity, the kind of morality that might be practiced by Eichmann, Putin, Trump or so many others.
*** Since Putin's pose of support for the Russian Orthodox Church will be brought up, I think it's merely a matter of utility to him, as much a tool of suckering the greatest number of Russians to support him, eliminating the effective opposition of what should be a force of moral persuasion against keeping someone as evil as he is in office. I would certainly have no problem with a deep criticism of the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church for its role in producing the amoral catastrophe of the Russian Mafia State, today. However, in the case of the Patriarch of Moscow, he's in violation of the morality of Jesus, the Law, the Prophets, I defy any utilitarian to show the equations of what principle of utilitarianism Putin could be held to be in definitive violation of.
Update: I will try to look it up later, but I believe it was the geneticist Karl Pearson who defined Darwinism in terms of "death rate". It is, actually, what it is, the belief that natural selection is a force of nature, like gravity or other basic laws of physics or chemistry, turns death into a creative force, determining the future of life, speciation, etc. It turns death into a creator god, of sorts. And, as you can see even from the earliest articulations by Darwin and his named, chosen disciples, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, etc. they all anticipated the active use of death, even through intentional policy, as a means of "improving" the human species. That's what all my blog posts mentioned above did, they proved that those men said those things. What Karl Pearson contemplated as a result of his belief in that was as depraved as the musings of any Nazi physiologist or even physician.
1. The idea that we could possibly determine "the greater happiness" never mind determining the number of people that would make happy, is pretty much absurd on its face.
2. The idea that we have the foresight to determine the ultimate or even future results of things that make people happy now which might turn sour and cause enormous unhappiness to even more people, perhaps all people, requires giving people, now, super-human powers that they obviously don't have.
3. The idea that we can determine the ranking of causes of happiness and unhappiness on that kind of scale is absurd. There have been proponents of utilitarianism who, when confronted with such ideas of whether or not murdering every last Jew in the world would lead to the happiness of all of the survivors, have been forced on the power of their utilitarian creed, to float the idea that such a type of thing would have to be determined to be right.
I haven't seen anything in any articulation of utilitarianism that has gotten past any of the problems with it, I think the intellectual tergiversations that Fyfe has gone through for his "desire utilitarianism" and Peter Singer for his bizarre articulations of it which, while vastly popular among atheists seems to center on that most exciting thing about what has pervertedly been called "ethics" in university philosophy departments, drawing up lists of people it's not only OK to murder, but who should be murdered. I certainly don't see any of the various species of utilitarianism going back to Bentham and John Stuart Mills which doesn't take the "question of evil" atheists throw up against God and greatly exacerbate it by advocating godly powers to make decisions like that among human beings. No doubt led by university trained "ethicists".
A lot of very smart people, going back centuries, now, have tried to find an atheist, materialist, "scientific" replacement for morality, mostly the morality articulated by the Jewish-Christian scriptures and all I see is it getting worse and more depraved. I think in Peter Singer we can attribute a lot of that increase in depravity to his and other such utilitarians and "ethicists" desire to pretend you can latch onto the repute of Darwin to give persuasive "scientific" force to their efforts. But as I've spent scores of posts to documenting in the word of Darwin and his appointed followers, Darwinism is morally depraved, inevitably, because natural selection is about grading organisms, including human beings according to some notion of "fitness" and cutting them and their possible or real offspring from the future, through involuntary sterilization in the more "humane" versions of that but, ususally, getting to the murder of millions, tens of millions, and not putting out of consideration the murders of hundreds of millions of people.
Atheism has produced depravities in intellectual thought, into academic life, introduced such depravities into polite consideration that more than match anything you can throw out in the long history of Christianity or Judaism or even the "historical" books of the Old Testament. Considering they're talking about murdering people, infants, others, I have never heard much in the way of proportionate or sufficiently strong atheist academic or even the NPR-Fresh Air level** criticism of a Peter Singer who are, after all, calling for the murders of infants or such utilitarians who contemplate the moral rightness of murdering all of any ethnic group for the "ultimate happiness" of more people that would be murdered in such a utilitarian fantasy. Consider the virtual non-existence of that among polite society, especially among those people who will point to the stories in Joshua or other books of the Old Testament identifying them as conclusive evidence of the depravity of all religion and its danger to the world, today. Those killings in Canaan might or might not be a report of history, the moral nature of them have been debated repeatedly because they are at variance with the morality of the Commandments of Judaism and the Gospel of Jesus. Get back to me when atheists spend anywhere near as much time debating the morality of Darwin's theory as even he contemplated it being applied to the human species, something the Nazis and eugenicists actually did do in living historical memory. Consider that especially in light of the revival of eugenics talk which has gone from science and academia into the popular press, our politics and the courts.
I think it's gone on long enough so that we can be fairly certain that whenever materialist-atheist philosophers or "ethicists" are confronted with these questions, eventually they'll come around to drawing up a list of who we can or, eventually, should kill.
I don't think today's or atheists in the future will be any more clever than those of the past. Their prescriptions for lesser problems of morality than who should we murder are generally not much less problematic.
I would invite you to look at the mental gyrations and gymnastics that Alonzo Fyfe has to go through in his seemingly futile articulation of his basis for morality and ask yourself how any such attempt is supposed to work among everyday people who will certainly never even hear the word "utilitarian" in the governance of their lives, how they are supposed to make those calculations of which goods are "greater" which will result in the greater happiness to "greater numbers" than the number of those who will be entirely unhappy with it. Ask yourself how comfortable you would be having that being the basis of actions by Congress, the Senate, the Executive branch or the morally depraved Supreme Court, of them having that as the basis of their deliberations and decisions. I ask you that, especially, considering the universe of concern of the Republican Party today, when they have rigged elections that put them in control even when they have fewer votes than their opponents.
Atheism doesn't work, materialism doesn't work except to produce depravity. I think what we see in Putin's criminal state is what you can expect will be the eventual outcome of those, no morality at all.***
* Thinking about it as I'm writing this, I think for Fyfe, as for virtually all of the atheist "ethicists" the "ethics" aren't their primary concern, it's the promotion of atheism. I think that's a primary motive that is shared by a lot of people in academia, even in the sciences. I think that accounts for how some of them could say some of the most amorally depraved things and not bat can eyelash, because they are smart enough to know such depravity is a logical inevitability in their promotion of atheism and materialism. There is no way to get by the fact that materialism inevitably demotes human beings to the status of objects which have no rights and no moral obligations. Eventually, every atheist system of "morality" will be reduced to that status, it's inescapable based in that hard fact of what materialism is.
** I think they're too polite to really push it, they don't want to appear uncivil to those who advocate murder under the wing of academia and intellectual repute, or they don't want to be unfashionably concerned with such moral questions. They might be considered unfashionably unscientific and "objective" if they called it what it is, obvious amoral depravity, the kind of morality that might be practiced by Eichmann, Putin, Trump or so many others.
*** Since Putin's pose of support for the Russian Orthodox Church will be brought up, I think it's merely a matter of utility to him, as much a tool of suckering the greatest number of Russians to support him, eliminating the effective opposition of what should be a force of moral persuasion against keeping someone as evil as he is in office. I would certainly have no problem with a deep criticism of the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church for its role in producing the amoral catastrophe of the Russian Mafia State, today. However, in the case of the Patriarch of Moscow, he's in violation of the morality of Jesus, the Law, the Prophets, I defy any utilitarian to show the equations of what principle of utilitarianism Putin could be held to be in definitive violation of.
Update: I will try to look it up later, but I believe it was the geneticist Karl Pearson who defined Darwinism in terms of "death rate". It is, actually, what it is, the belief that natural selection is a force of nature, like gravity or other basic laws of physics or chemistry, turns death into a creative force, determining the future of life, speciation, etc. It turns death into a creator god, of sorts. And, as you can see even from the earliest articulations by Darwin and his named, chosen disciples, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, etc. they all anticipated the active use of death, even through intentional policy, as a means of "improving" the human species. That's what all my blog posts mentioned above did, they proved that those men said those things. What Karl Pearson contemplated as a result of his belief in that was as depraved as the musings of any Nazi physiologist or even physician.
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
A Response - Pulling Your Head Out Of That Old 18th Century Ass
If I didn't read The Bible, if I didn't meditate on The Law and the Gospel, if I didn't listen to liturgy online most days I don't think I could cope with the horror of the world as it descends into Billionaire fascism and the ecological catastrophe they have brought us to. And I don't think I'd be able to comprehend that there might be a way out of it. I do that even as I look at the secular left and see it insisting on the same old things that have not only not worked but in a lot of cases aided the descent into fascism. I'm convinced that the secular left, the atheist left is inevitably a part of that because on the most basic level the intellectual materialism of that secular left is the same thing as the vulgar materialism of the pseudo-Christian right.
That's what I've got, what the atheists have is that same old, same old junk that hasn't ever worked and the insistence that, somehow, by materialistic magic, I guess, it's somehow going to start doing now what it has failed to do, consistently, since the 18th century. When it is applied, it has the opposite results of what it promises. The Law, The Gospel, starting out by believing that God makes rights and moral obligations really works when those are applied.
A debt jubilee as commanded in The Law would be nearly universally popular and it would make an excellent beginning in wiping out inequality. You can only get rid of the billionaire masters by leveling them to the same level we are on.
A debt jubilee as commanded in The Law would be nearly universally popular and it would make an excellent beginning in wiping out inequality. You can only get rid of the billionaire masters by leveling them to the same level we are on.
The Tender Mercies Of The White Collar Elite For The Other Members Of Their Class Will Be On Full Display In This As All Past Judiciary Committee Confirmation Hearings
If you haven't watched the segment of Sam Seder's Majority Report last night, you should REMEMBER THE CHILDREN, as you do. The title of the WaPo piece he were mocking,From "Kellyanne Conway to Stephen Miller, Trump’s advisers face taunts from hecklers around D.C." by Paul Schwartzman and Josh Dawsey. If you haven't gotten Sam Seder's, Michael Brooks, et al's take on the story you should.
The Trump regime is violating a court order that these thugs reunite the children they abducted and have been holding in baby concentration camps with their parents, the deadline on reuniting ALL 102 of the children under five they hold and they've not complied, even though these kidnapping blackmailers have both the children and their parents in custody.
It doesn't look like they ever intended to comply with the court order that they do so, apparently they figure their bosses ability to ignore court orders covers them with a penumbra of impunity. We have yet to see if they're correct, as Charles Pierce pointed out, they didn't comply with a clear order of a judge and yet none of the thugs are in jail.
Federal San Diego Judge Dana Sabraw initially gave the government a July 10 deadline to reunite the 102 children under the age of 5 who were ripped from their undocumented parents because of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. Sabraw allowed the Trump administration an extension on that deadline Monday after Justice Department lawyer Sarah Fabian said she only expected about half of the kids to be reconnected with their parents. But, in a court filing Tuesday, Fabian revealed that a mere four of the 102 children under 5 had been reunified with their parents, adding she expected another 34 to be reunited by the end of the day. If accurate, that brings the total number of reunified kids to 38 — which amounts to just above one-third of all the children.
. . . Fabian maintained in the court papers the government is in “compliance with the Court’s order,” even though it blew Sabraw’s initial deadline and didn’t live up to its subsequent promises. The American Civil Liberties Union — which successfully argued last month the Trump administration must reunite the separated migrant families — called bull. “Plaintiffs recognize that Defendants cannot yet reunify the parents who are currently being held in criminal custody,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt wrote in a response filing. “But as to all other Class Members with children under five, the government is not in compliance with the clear deadline ordered by the Court."
And with that claim by attorney Fabian that they are in compliance, I don't have any hesitation to point out she is the one who became famous last Friday when she said she couldn't be working on the weekend because she was dog-sitting, one would imagine so her friends dog wouldn't have to spend the weekend in canine confinement while scores of babies and thousands of other kidnapped children were in jail. Something some lawyers and those in the media, even those opposed to Trump's kidnapping and blackmail scheme, perhaps turning into trafficking in babies, have said she shouldn't be faulted over her priorities but with that claim in court, fuck with the comity of the white collar class for its own.
Charles Pierce's question of why no one went to jail over this is an excellent one, in the world of the underclasses that most Americans live in people go to jail for violating not only a judge's order but an extension asked for and granted on the basis of promises of compliance.
Charles Pierce made one error in his piece, at the very end he said, "This is barely organized crime." What it is is unconcealed organized crime which isn't called that because of that comity white collar people, judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and, obviously journalists give to people of their class.
Americans have to call bull shit on that practice because it is a large part of how we got into this dangerous position in the first place. And, believe me, it won't be the Ivy-may as well be Ivy class of highly paid professionals that will call it bull shit because that would be indelicate.
If you want an excellent example of that, go over the past confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices, keeping emetics on hand as, especially considering their behavior on the Supreme Court, listening to their lies and those told on their behalf will make you sick.
I would especially point out that of Samuel Alito, in which Professor Ronald Sullivan pointed out how Alito, as a member of a lower court, had pooh-poohed the strip search of a 10-year-old girl on the basis that her rights and dignity were nothing, while, in another case, he expressed the most articulate indignation and outrage when the wife of a wealthy veterinarian, an affluent adult, was strip searched. The child was not a suspect in a crime, the wealthy adult was. You can find that testimony beginning on page 734 of the transcript. Something that Republican and some Democratic Senators apparently had no problem with as they voted to confirm him, something many members of Alito's court, his law school chums and other lawyers associated with him weren't bothered by, either, as they testified what a wonderful person, what a wonderful judge he was, some of them supposedly liberals. I listened to the whole thing and their praise turned my stomach, as did their empty, obviously lying assertions that he could be counted on to produce justice on the basis of the evidence and not his personal ideology and to serve the inequality which was the brand he represented and still represents on the Supreme Court.
When the disgusting, disgraceful Alan Dershowitz introduced us to the word "testilying," the practice of lying while giving testimony, he was talking about cops who lie under oath to get a conviction. But that practice is never called that when it's done by white-collar liars of the kind who lied for Samuel Alito, lies because every single person who said he would be impartial were lying, they knew they were lying, all of the Senators and all of the journalists . . . everyone in the room knew they were lying and the consequences of their pretense is that the country is on the cusp of overt fascism. And Alan Dershowitz is supporting that even as he lies about his political and ethical position.
The white collar world is largely based on lying of that kind, especially that of the law and, even more so, journalism. And those lies are told on behalf of the bald class interest of affluent elite professionals for each other and on behalf of their patrons who are the real elite. And yet they have to wonder why the plebs are distrustful, suspicious and cynical. I remember the 2008 campaign from the blue collar class which I live in and, by income, am a member of, people wanted to believe Barack Obama was going to produce all manner of justice, they really wanted to believe he would. And, in response to that, he appointed Eric Holder as Attorney General, the man who let off the richest of the gangsters who had tanked the economy through massive theft and cheating and bilking, destroying lives. He let them off entirely. That as much as racism led to the disasterous election of 2010. If they had put the gangsters in jail, they'd have been working class heroes, which I think they would not have wanted to be, preferring the honors of their own class.
If you want to pretend we don't already know that Brett Kavanaugh will lie during his confirmation hearings, he's already gotten away with it during previous confirmation hearings with impunity, why would he possibly imagine there will be any cost for him doing so, now? Dick Durban, to his credit, is pointing this out.
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