How I Like To Celebrate the 4th

Doesn't it Make Your Heart Bleed?

"Cern should really build a larger auditorium. The present one is nice and cosy, but it is embarrassing and sad to see many distinguished colleagues queueing up at five in the morning knowing that they have a slim chance to get a seat, after working for 20 years on finding the Higgs boson,said Dorigo (a scientist on the CMS experimental team at Cern)."   


Well, that's gratitude for you.   The thing cost 8 Billion dollars (that they'd admitted to the last time I looked) and who knows how much to operate.   You've got to wonder how much of that came out of Dorigo's, Higgs' and the other "many distinguished colleagues" pockets.   

It's a subatomic particle, for Pete's sake, it's not the solution to global warming or hunger.   I'd like to see a list of practical benefits to living beings that have come out of the quest for the last three or four subatomic particles and an honest estimate at the cost. 

Raymond Premru: In Memoriam

Arnold Schoenberg Kol Nidre

Rabbi:
The Kabalah tells a legend:
At the beginning God said: "Let There Be Light."
Out of space a flame burst out.
God crushed that light to atoms.
Myriads of sparks are hidden in our world, but
not all of us behold them.
The selfglorious, who walks arrogantly upright,
will never perceive one;
but the meek and modest, eyes downcast,
he sees it.
"A light is sown for the pious."
Bischiwo Schel Malo Uwischiwo Schel Mato
In the name of God!
We solemnly proclaim
that every transgressor,
be it that he was unfaithful to Our People be-
cause of fear,
or mislead by false doctrines of any kind,
out of weakness or greed:
we give him leave
to be one with us in prayer tonight,
A light is sown for the pious, a light is sown for
the repenting sinner.

(Kol Nidre)
All vows, oaths, promises and plights of any
kind,
wherewith we pledged ourselves
counter to our inherited faith in God,
who is One, Everlasting, Unseen, Unfathomable,
we declare these null and void.
We repent that these obligations have estranged
us from the sacred task we were chosen for.

Chor:
We repent.

Rabbi:
We repent.
We shall strive from this day of atonement till
the next
to avoid such and similar obligation,
so that the Yom Kippur to follow
may come to us for good.

Chor:
All vows and oaths and promises and plights of
any kind
(etc.)
may come to us for good.

Rabbi + Choir:
Whatever binds us to falsehood
may be absolved, released, annulled, made void
and of no power.

Chor:
Hence all such vows shall be no vows,
and all such bonds shall be no bonds,
all such oaths shall be not oaths.
We repent.
Null and void be our vows.
We repent them.
A light is sown for the sinner.

Rabbi:
We give him leave to be one with us in prayer
tonight.

Chor:
We repent.

Has Jerry Coyne Gone Nuts?

In my posts earlier this year I addressed Jerry Coyne's attack against the most basic foundations of democracy and liberalism,  not that one is supposed to notice those are casualties of following his 18th century materialism to its necessary conclusions.

Since there are so many more important things than you can get to in one lifetime,  I don't follow Coyne's blog very closely.   I'd long ago figured he was often marginally rational when not firmly fixed on his narrow topic of professional discipline or under the eye of an editor, I didn't look to him as a source of science news or rational thinking.

I'd missed Coyne's attacks on James A. Shapiro earlier this year until I happened on it when recently dipping into the crazy soup that his blog is.   You can judge for yourself it's accuracy but you should read what Shapiro actually said and his response to Coyne's out of control attacks.   As with so much of what Coyne writes when he's free to say just what he thinks,  Shapiro gives him about as much of a benefit of the doubt as is possible when he says:

Jerry, I think you need to do better next time. Please address my real arguments, not your own mischaracterizations.

But the problem with blogging, as can be seen in Coyne's comment threads, is that a blogger like Coyne doesn't appeal to a wider group that will provide an honest review and come up with something less biased, he appeals to his fellow ideologues, many of whom haven't got the slightest idea what the issues are.  His blog, as so many "science blogs" use the social status of science to present ideological propaganda and attacks as a more reliable truth.    Some others are as ideological but I'm not aware of any other widely read science blogger who more consistently misrepresents his adversaries in a way that makes me wonder at the emotional stability of the blogger.

I think it's time to ask if Jerry Coyne isn't just plain nuts.  As his blog goes on,  he reminds me ever more of Glenn Beck.

UPDATE:   I withdraw the question,  having looked around his blog the last couple of days, he's totally nuts. His fans don't care that he's raving.   I'm aware that the standards of atheist thinking are as unconcerned with accuracy, rational coherence and fidelity to real life as that of your typical tea party oriented site.   It is morbidly fascinating to me how many figures in science, popularly regarded as the high church of reason and sanity,  are so obviously cracked.

Arnold Schoenberg: The Book of the Hanging Gardens

Text:Stefan George



Elizabeth Smith, soprano
Joseph Yungen, piano


One of the great advantages of the internet is that it is possible to listen to recordings of performances that won't be available commercially.   The kind of purpose public radio used to serve but which it has abandoned.   The sound isn't up to studio standards but it is still a valuable thing  to hear artists at work.  It's better than radio sound often is, as well.

Denying We Have Placed Ourselves On The Edge of Extinction: The Book of the Hanging Gardens

Alfred Brendel,  that great pianist,  once said that the reason Arnold Schoenberg's music was disliked wasn't that it was cold "musical mathematics", the most unoriginal of frequently parroted attempts at musical put downs*.   Brendel said that Schoenberg's music was hated because it was some of the most intensely emotional music ever written.   I  recall he mentioned the mono-drama Erwartung  and the early Three Pieces op.11 as examples. (I'd suggest YouTube if you aren't familiar with and want to try them)  Anyone who is really familiar with those pieces of  extremely condensed emotion expressed in  ultra-saturated, chromatic melody and harmony would find his description of Schoenberg's music confirmed.   It is some of the most emotionally intense music ever composed. 


I've loved Schoenberg's music since the first time I heard the quintet arrangement of the First Chamber Symphony as a teenager.  It grabbed me in the third measure and it has never let me go.   The orchestral versions of it are even more intense.   


The Book of the Hanging Gardens is a song cycle from around the same time. [ See post above ]  I've been listening to it for decades and have played piano for some of the songs.   I love the music very much for the same reasons I do every one of Schoenberg's published pieces.  It is extremely beautiful, the production of a musical genius of the same order as Beethoven or Debussy.   Milton Babbitt once said that fifty years after its composition,  music was till trying to come up to it.   The ensuing decades haven't done anything to resolve that situation.   But it is  not an easy work to love, being extremely disturbing.  Disturbing in a way that so far surpasses a superficially unsettling, lesser experience that it's really inadequate to describe what I mean.  It isn't merely in the sound or the words or the interplay of those, it is in the entire context of the work, its two creators and the context of all of them in the very real world of their creation.  The rest of this post is an attempt to merely begin at a description of what I mean when I say that.  Trying, as well,  to give some, small description of  the scope of Arnold Schoenberg's intellectual and artistic capacity, his position in intellectual and musical history and what the failure to listen to him tells us about us.   There is no recent creative genius I'm aware of who was so engaged in external world and who consciously and,  I would guess, unconsciously expressed that world in their art.   


The poetry that Schoenberg set is by the very deeply ambiguous and often repulsive Stefan George*.  There is no other possible description but that it is decadent.   It always seems to be pulled between sublimity and an abyss of destructive self-indulgence.  Schoenberg's music more surely is on the side of the sublime, though it openly chooses to involve itself in the amoral pit that the text plays on.   


George was enough of a fascist that when the Nazis took over Goebbels offered him the leadership of the Academy of Arts.    George refused.   Some think his refusal was not based in moral clarity but in his being enough of an effete aristocrat that he disdained the vulgarity of the Nazis.    He left Germany for Switzerland, not being able to tolerate the Nazis but not openly resisting them, dying within the year.      He had associates and followers who were Jewish (though George was somewhat antisemetic),  Nazis, anti-Nazi fascist (some of them were involved in a plot to kill Hitler).... He was also someone who was semi-openly gay even as the Nazis were beginning their oppression of gay people.   He was nostalgic for the declining Germanic military aristocracy.  I recall reading that he was attended by a Junker at his deathbed but am not sure if that's a myth or the truth.

Schoenberg's choice of poetry in many of his vocal works is extremely troubling or at least strange.   His colleague and associate Eduard Stuermann talked about how the extreme decadence of the poetry of Pierrot Lunaire seemed to inspire him, even as Schoenberg expressed skepticism about using it ("We'll have nothing to do with that!").  In that case the choice of poetry was the choice of Albertine Zehme, who commissioned the piece so she could perform it but, despite his misgivings, Stuermann said that something in the decadent poetry inspired Schoenberg.  He also pointed to his settings of George as another example.   As anyone can hear,  Schoenberg transformed such bizarre material into something that is emblematic of the intellectual climate and the disordered times.   The premier of Pierrot was 1912, two years before the First World War demolished the world Schoenberg grew up in.   He seems to have read the signs of the time and saw where they led. 


I've repeatedly wondered why he would choose to set someone he must have known was as morally tainted as George.   The best I've come up with is that he was expressing the intensely troubled moral ambiguity of the period he was living in.   The absolute morality of  traditional religion was considered passe in his circles and with it an absolute sense of morality.   Much of philosophical writing during his life was the full and far from pure flowering of a brutal materialism that outright rejected morality in favor of a bloody interpretation of natural selection with individual, social and national expressions of its assumptions.  


And that was only one of the many streams of thought current in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century.   Many of those were anything from morally ambiguous to amoral to reveling in the depravity in the wake of an asserted death of morality.   As well there were the intersecting ambiguities of vision promoted by the pseudo-science of psychology as well as the alien, though far less ambiguous, findings of physics.**

Schoenberg lived in that milieu and he was certainly well aware of it.   He was a thoroughly modern man of his times, extremely well cultured and yet not of the same world.  And in Vienna from the late 19th century, through the first decades of the 20th century, the degenerating Austrian empire with its over-ripe to rotting brilliance, the First World War, the aftermath with the staggering inflation and material deprevation, the turn into fascism with the failure of impractical attempts at democracy and the League of Nations, and into the Nazi period and the Second world war,  exile in the United States,  the after war years and into the very beginning of the casual decadence of Southern California in the 1950s,  Schoenberg's witness was almost incomprehensibly broad.   Over all of that was the steady rise of scientific racism, antisemitism, racing to the horrible epoch of the Holocaust, something which endangered and impinged on him, interacting with choices he had made earlier in his life.  Beginning as a somewhat secular Jew, Schoenberg converted to Catholicism in time to have history make that choice extremely troubling in far more than just its implications.    He reconverted to Judaism in response to the Holocaust and wrote several of his greatest works as a direct result of facing the meaning of the history of the 1920s through the Second World War and its aftermath.   For a composer who was dealing so intensely with life in the last years of the 19th century (Transfigured Night),  experiencing the subsequent decades with a high degree of knowledge, intellectual and moral discernment, it is not any surprise that the musical language he expressed his experience in would become far more emotional as time went on.   By the time he reaches clarity in his reconversion compositions,  Schoenberg did more to express the first half of the 20th century than any artist in any medium.  His music expresses more about the subsequent years, under serious consideration, than anyone else I'm familiar with.   By comparison, few others can come away without seeming, in some way, less serious or even trivial.  When he arrives at  his final compositions there is a sense that he had made his final choice, he had committed to a moral vision if not a path in response to  as clear a view of the alternative as aware humanity has ever had.   The issues of moral choice that he faced, squarely, in his music, if not in life,  are unfashionable, rejected as old fashioned and unscientific.   That refusal to choose is a continuation of the same moral failure that led to the disasters of the 20th century.

To ignore Schoenberg's interpretation of his time,  the view of an extremely cultured artist, dealing directly with the horrors and moral issues that are made more exigent from our refusal to learn from our recent past is an indictment of our current intellectual life.   Refusing to hear an artist dealing directly with the dangers of leaning over and looking into the most profound abyss our species has created for our world in a way that is brave, unsparing and absolutely human, is an act of intellectual and moral cowardice.   The failure of the alleged intellectual class to engage with it is a symptom of the failure of our intellectual elite.   An intellectual class that remains indifferent to Arnold Schoenberg betrays its shallowness as certainly as any class that rejects the scientific or mathematical accomplishments of his time.   Imagine if the intelligentsia of the 19th century had rejected Beethoven and you can see what it means.  Considering Schoenberg's macrocosmic address of real life as it deals with issues of life and death,  morality and depravity,  that indifference is a manifestation of complete cowardice and self indulgence.  It is a choice for what lies in the dead abyss,  beyond the the garden terrace.  

* I'm aware of a form of that charge going back to at least the late 18th century.

** I am writing another post about the intersection between these and moral reform with the far from untroubled results.

EschaDone: On The Natural Mortality of Human Institutions

I used to be a regular commentator at Eschaton Blog,  having gone through two pseudonyms there, EPT and, then,  olvlzl,   before posting under my name.   I never hid that all were one and the same .   I got to Eschaton  not long after it started from the legendary Media Whores Online .  MWO  is still my idea of what a lefty political blog should be,  Atrios, the owner of Eschaton,  was also a regular at MWO and was rumored to have been something of a protegee of the mysterious owner, "The Horse".

Atrios often wrote quite cogently on economic topics - his professional training is in economics -  and infrastructure as well as politics.   I certainly didn't agree with everything he said,  Atrios' orientation is more what I've come to think of as liberalish-libertarian than genuinely liberal or leftist but I think his heart is mostly in the right place.  The comment threads have always been notorious as an off-topic free for all.   Which is often too bad as Atrios is competent  in his area of expertise and those posts are worth reading   Sadly, he seldom writes them anymore.

The place being the chaotic bar room it was in those years was far from all bad.  I learned a lot from the links, the citations, the discussions and the fights.   It was extremely stimulating and productive as well as entertaining.   I remember talking with another former regular about how we'd used the discussion at Eschaton to test arguments.

Anyway, from the golden age of Eschaton when clunky Haloscan treads used to regularly go into the high hundreds of comments, often going over a thousand,  things have gradually dwindled down to a small, hard core of regulars who form a sort of in-crowd.    Most of the former regulars have left over the years, some of them once mainstays of the commenting community.   Many of the drop outs were people who provided the most interesting content on the blog.   They weren't often replaced by new regulars.   I saw only one name that wasn't familiar to me on my last fortnight of giving it another try.  Some of those who remain are rather nice people who have something interesting to say.   But, increasingly, the comments are dominated by a core intent on imposing their eternal high school level clique domination  and speech code on it and people who seem to be willing to tolerate that.    Last week there was one relatively recent addition who was rather brutally attacked by the dominant clique on a minor lapse of their imposed decorum.   I haven't seen him there in the several lurkings  that I've done as research for this post the last few days.   No idea if he's gone for good but it was ugly.

You might guess from two of my recent posts, I've clashed with the dominant clique.  More and more, in the past years to the point where I'd several times taken a voluntary leave of it, once for most of a year.    On the Eschaton comment threads it is practically de rigueur to be anti-religious, especially anti-Catholic,  irrationally absolutist in a number of issues  and to maintain the attitude of a, frankly, assholish 12-year-old boy about most areas capable of being considered "transgressive".   You are not to critisize icons of pop culture,  especially those considered very naughty.    At the same time there is a very distinct form of class snobbery that is part of the mix.  Ivy League schools and many other, hardly progressive,  entities are also not to be dissed.  Anything that carries the name of "science", even the most obviously bogus and anti-liberal ideas of ideology posing as science,  is held as far more sacrosanct than most practicing Catholics I know require their religion to be held in.   What was interesting about my stepping over a line last week that has gotten me banned for the second time this year - I'd earlier the same day said that I was going to drop out again - was, apparently, my transgressing against the mandatory respect for the Rolling Stones and Penn Jillette's  boring  one-dirty-joke movie, The Aristocrats.   I admit that I tried to kick up something like the old excitement in those and it's just not there anymore.   It's gone.

I suspect that there is something like a natural life span for human institutions and ten years for any blog is probably as long as you should expect it to last.   I'd lasted longer at Eschaton than I have at other blogs out of affection for a number of the regulars.   But anyone who will stand up to the kewl kids who sit on the school house steps seems to have already left.   This last time wasn't  interesting or entertaining,  despite a few occasions to have some minor fun.   It's over.  It's done.  There's not even any reason to lurk.  It's gone from being a rowdy adult forum for free thought to exactly that,  the clique domination of high school.  Maybe that's what happens when a popular blog gets old.    Can it be avoided?   I don't know, apparently Atrios is OK with things as they've developed and it's his blog.  There are lots of others out there.

Perhaps The Horse was wise to go out on top.   One thing I learned at Eschaton a  long time ago was the phrase "jumped the shark".   

Atheist Organizations and Tax Deductions

Don't know why it didn't occur to me before this morning while  reading about the gazillionth atheist whine about donations to religious organizations being tax deductible but I know for a fact that donations to the anti-religious:

American Humanists Association
Ayn Rand Institute

Center for Inquiry

Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (I ususally write "Skeptical" in quotes in this case)

James Randi Educational Foundation (same for "Educational")
Council for Secular Humanism 
Freedom From Religion Foundation
International Institute for Humanistic Studies
etc. 

.... are tax deductible.    

How many of them are directly involved in care of the sick, feeding the poor, clothing the naked or other legitimate reasons for tax deductible status? 

You care to add to the list of atheist and anti-religious organizations that have "tax-deductible" status? 

When A Charge of Antisemitism Is A Tactical Smear

The subject of this post is the underside of identity politics,  the possibility to game those for personal advantage by self-centered jerks, regardless of justification or reason.    It was motivated from a personal experience of the past several months.

I will make no apology for defending myself in a way that anyone has the right to do.  I take a repeated accusation of antisemitism made against me quite seriously.

First,  the blog exchange on Eschaton that began my thinking about this.   I will note that anger at the stylishly acceptable  bigotry of  Steve Simels' snark about Roma was my motive in my first response, though it was, sincerely, what I thought.  I include the identity of the person who commented about Florida because Simels did in his original comment and I don't want to be accused of editing the record.

--------

Steve Simels:

R. McGeddon, futilitarian  My solution has always been to move Israel to Florida. 

And while we're at it, the Gypsies need a homeland too.

I think there's an abandoned shopping mall in Jersey they could have.

Anthony McCarthy:

I'd love to have more Jews living in the United States. I wish they'd offered emigration here as an alternative to the disaster that putting Israel in Palestine has caused. Taking a piece out some place like Arizona if a state was desired would have been a better idea.

Only the ideological ancestors of the End Timers would have prevented that happening.

Steve Simels:

Oh, I'm sure the Jews would have been welcomed in Arizona with open arms.

Anthony McCarthy:

Unlike they were in Palestine, you mean?

Steve Simels:

See, now you're actually starting to piss me off.

Anthony McCarthy:

Seriously, I'd love to have a few million more Jews in the United States, one of the most progressive constituencies in the country, great philanthropists, brilliant disuptationists. Living here in relative safety and security. What could possibly be objectionable to that? The Likudniks would come to, or maybe not if those with a history of terrorism were excluded.

-------

Apparently Steve Simels is unaware of Jewish communities in Arizona and the presence of Jewish settlers in the old American West.  In passing, there was also our exchange on Aaron Copland, the music laureate of the American west, without whom film scores of classic westerns would be quite a bit more boring since studio composers would have had to steal from a lesser composer.   As Simels likes to present himself as a cineaste, it was one of his most desperately clueless moments in our duel.  

Also apparent is the disparity in permitted articulation between a snarky assertion of ethnic characterization and what I said.  What could be trashier and more keeping with anti-Roma stereotyping than proposing a "Gypsy" homeland" in an abandoned mall?   Proposing Florida as a "Jewish homeland" is certainly permitted as no objection was raised to it, though I'd think it was borderline.   But I address that kind of fashionable expression later in this post.  


This exchange has set off months of attacks against me. most but not all of them of them on Eschaton, by Steve Simels, a pop-music critic and blog presence on some of the leftish blogs I frequent.  He has been attacking me with strong implications of anti-Semitism since that exchage, though we'd clashed on other things before that.   He usually forms his accusations as demands that I apologize for the "Jew stuff",  secure in the knowledge, it seems,  that most of those who read what he said didn't have any idea what he referrs to.   After he did that a few times I went back and copied the exchange and the url where it  can be found for anyone who was curious to see what my offense consisted of, though I'm sure most couldn't have been bothered to find out.   In more recent incidents I challenged Simels to tell everyone just what he meant by "Jew stuff" which he hasn't done yet.  


You can see the substance of my comment that Simels found so offensive.  I regretted that either Jews hadn't been admitted into the United States,  where Simels apparently lives in such contentment that he hasn't left it,  or that land hadn't been provided for a homeland in North America as opposed to Palestine where the state of Israel has been in a state of constant warfare and under threat of terrorism since its founding.   And, as opposed to snarkily proposing a "homeland" for "Gypsies"  in "an abandoned shopping mall in Jersey" what I said can be successfully presented as an antisemitic statement.  As it continued,  in the original comment thread, and Simels asserted it was absurd to think that Jews could survive in Arizona (a point that he has harped on continually since then)  I said other things:

--------

Anthony McCarthy: 

OK, how about the North West. Or California. Or, hey, I'd really love to have lots of Jews in Northern Maine, we might actually turn into the liberal state that so many believe we are.  

And:

Anthony McCarthy:

With papers, of course. (snark from a relatively innocent bystander who I will not name)

Nope, full citizenship.

--------

It's my long experience as a gay man that, under the rare occasions when when conditions allow it, an asshole who happens to be a gay man will use his identity to attack and intimidate straight people who don't deserve it.   Assholes are called that for a reason and one of those is that they will use anything to manipulate people to achieve their ends.   I've seen other assholes use other aspects of identity to do the same,  some more successfully because conditions allow it.  I'm sure that is what Steve Simels has depended on in this instance.  Antisemtism is among the most successfully lodged accusations in the United States today.  As Arthur  Berger* said when his friend and colleague Virgil Thomson was accused of antisemitism, it's an easy accusation to make today.  That situation is so obviously the case that it is a charge that is frequently made in the most obviously absurd and inflammatory language against Jews.   In that use, the charge of antisemitism is used to silence criticisms of Israeli policy and to discredit the critics.  Clearly related to that is the way it was used against me, though, in a decidedly more modest and frivolous context.   

One of the little known parts of the little known gay history in the United States was a period in the late 1970s when it was fashionable among some gay men to spout explicit racism, sexism and bigotry.   Most of those I know of lived in New York City.  One person to whom I described it as a "flood of bigotry" corrected me by saying it was more like a tidal wave.  I couldn't help but thinking of those men as being assholes.   On one of the occasions when I pointed out that one of them was being an asshole he excused himself by saying he was the victim of bigotry all his life as a  gay man, as if he was telling me something I didn't know.   It was no excuse, it was the opposite of an excuse, my answer to him. 

After that there came the rise of Andrew Dice Clay and the beginning of the counterattack on "political correctness".    I was surprised to find out during his short reign as the king of fashionable racism, that Clay was Jewish.   Of course when you come across a member of a targeted minority group who freely expresses bigotry against others who are members of  beleaguered groups,  you wonder how can they be such an asshole.    Clay seems to have found his rightful place on the junk pile of pop-culture but the particular variety of bigotry he practiced is still with us, a feature of what sadly passes as hipster identity these days.   As I watch the spectacle of books and, I'd imagine plays,  turning Anne Frank into a stock character to be used satirically and the Holocaust, itself, becoming a similar prop in junk lit  -  can it be far behind, the movies -  I wouldn't count on real antisemitism not becoming far more mainstream.  That's what has happened with other forms of bigotry that were very briefly suppressed in the decade spanning the 60s and 70s.   Assholes will use anything if they think it might get them what they want, including hip, transgressively  bigoted remarks made to gain the cachet of coolitiude.  It would be among the stupidest things possible to allow the frivolous, dishonest use of accusations of bigotry to render legitimate accusations ineffective in present circumstances.

The reaction on the blog comment threads when I challenged Simels on his false charge of antisemitism was irritation with me.  Even when I was able to prove it was false and in face of his repeated failure to back it up when challenged.  As the accusation was made against me, I don't really care if people think defending myself is irritating.  It's something I'm familiar with as a gay man growing up in the 50s and 60s, defending yourself was never taken seriously.   That is something that has told me a lot about the real nature of blogging and, even more, commenting.   It's taught me something about the failure of liberal discourse and, with that, the failure of liberalism to win power and change laws to make life better.  A goal which I'm sure would be mocked in the the fashionable cynicism that goes hand in hand with the kind of pseudo-liberal gaming that is manifest in too many places today. 

* Steve Simels apparently googled or wikied  the late Arthur Berger, a composer, eminent music critic, theorist, professor at Brandeis University,  who he knows I  greatly admire,  and found a description of him as a serialist composer.  He has frequently used that to attack Arthur Berger and my taste in music.   If he knew Berger's music he'd know that much of it, perhaps most of it, is, actually, quite tonal.   In the future I may add a note about Simels' derision of Berger, Stefan Wolpe, Milton Babbitt and other composers I like in the context of this brawl.  

UPDATE:

You might compare the content of my comment that has set off many months of accusations of antisemitism made by Steve Simels  and others and this more recent exchange started by a comment by the Eschaton regular, "Macacawitz".

Macacawitz:

Religion and sexual dysfunction do go hand in hand, don't they?  All started when Teh Joos told us to start sawing off the tips of our willy's.  It's been all down hill from there.  Pedophilia, female circumcision, polygamy, general vagina paranoia, purity balls....the list goes on and on.

Anthony McCarthy:

Being a human being and sexual dysfunction go hand and hand.  

Anthony McCarthy:

Look at Freud. 

Macacawitz:

Do you think people would be sawing off the ends of their willy's if not for an imaginary sky daddy telling them to do it?  There are pros and cons to circumcision but doing it for "faith based" reasons is just nuts.

Anthony McCarthy:

Being circumcised is associated with decreased AIDS transmission.  
Hey, Simels,  get a load of this. 

Steve Simels:

Anthony McCarthy Collapse 
Being circumcised is associated with decreased AIDS transmission.   
Hey, Simels,  get a load of this.


And this has been yet another episode of Non Sequitur Theatre. Tune in again in a couple of minutes to witness Anthony trying to discern a difference between three and soup.

Macacawitz:


Steve.  I think he's trying to paint me as an antisemite, which of course I'm not.  When discussing the difference between 3 and soup, it's not far down the slippery slope before you're comparing  foreskin to marmalade.  

Anthony McCarthy:


You're the one dissing one of the most  well known  practices of Judaism in religious terms, Macacawitz.


Anthony McCarthy:


I'm finding it pretty funny to find out how many people in the mutual admiration club don't know what a non sequitur is. 

Simels, not to mention many other Eschaton regulars, made comments between those I've posted here.  Macacawitz' first comment was:

"Religion and sexual dysfunction do go hand in hand, don't they?  All started when Teh Joos told us to start sawing off the tips of our willy's.  It's been all down hill from there.  Pedophilia, female circumcision, polygamy, general vagina paranoia, purity balls....the list goes on and on."

Beginning with "Teh Joos" and continuing to attribute "pedophilia, female circumcision, polygamy, general vagina paranoia, purity balls.... " to one of the most foundational,  distinctive practices that distinguished Jews as a distinct population for thousands of years was insufficient to trigger the charge of antisemitism among those present.   Even explicitly saying that is what was meant.

Making the Nasty Boys Pout

or Failure to Transgress
  That was a crime I committed at the Eschaton blog the other night.   I failed to say that the boring, stupid, puerile, pointless, inflamed sphincter of a movie,  The Aristocrats, was anything except boring and stupid.  I was going to say that it was incredibly boring but it wasn't that interesting.

For anyone who was blessed enough to not be aware of it,  The Aristocrats is  Penn Jillette's -  one of America's biggest professional assholes -  movie of one boring will be-has been, has been-has been, never were,  after another telling what is billed as the filthiest joke in history.  There are a few actual comics in the movie who don't do much to enhance their cv by appearing in it, but even they can't carry the lame excuse of a premise for the movie.   In my act of mortal sin I said it was "a straight boy's idea of a dirty joke".   Since I won't repeat other peoples' material, when it's that filthy, you're going to have to take my word for it that I've heard much dirtier and, marginally,  funnier.  "The Aristocrats" really exists as a stupid party game among professional stand-up comics, more than as a joke.   It's good mostly to show how untalented, uncreative, undeveloped and stupid so many of the people who go into that once fine and now very minor line of show biz are.   The really good stand up comics telling the joke could have made this a minor short subject instead of the boring, tedious, stupidity that Penn Jillette makes of it.  The commentary does something to relieve some of the boredom of the joke with annoyingly pretentious content.

The substance of the game is to try to outdo other excuses for comedians by coming up with more perverted, more disgusting, more offensively offensive bits for a family show biz act.  After as long a stream of that as the ham can manage to come up with, the guy he's pitching the act to asks what the tsunami of depravity is called and the answer is "The Aristocrats".   Really clever, huh?    You can see how many of the jerks you've seen on blogs would think that was brilliant.  The whole point being that you have to come up with something more perverse and disgusting than the one before, the act regularly presents pedophilia, rape, incest, sadism , pointless violence and the like as humor.   In what is celebrated as a major cultural milestone jokes about 9-11 figures into its legend.   Genocide is presented as an occasion of hilarity as well.

What's most interesting about the thing is the attitude a lot of people who mistake themselves as being on the left have about it.   The fact that it's billed as incredibly filthy  and transgressive is supposed to make it an object of reverence.  I mean that word quite literally,  The Aristocrats, by virtue of its intended offensiveness,  is supposed to be some kind of icon of freedom and all that is good and wonderful about liberty and modernism and all that is good and sciency.   To paraphrase George M. Cohan,  many a bum act has been saved by citing the First Amendment.  We're way beyond the point where Ulysses, regarded as an oppressed object of sanctity, was succeeded by Last Exit to Brooklyn.  Now it's anything the decayed mind of an eternally adolescent asshole can dream up that is to be given a position that places it above allowable criticism in liberalish-libertarian sanctimony.  It doesn't hurt its position when it's a piece of  commercial garbage guaranteed to turn a profit.  Money has such a way of adding respectability.  That it's a regressive boys-club retreat to the time before second wave feminism and the civil rights movement took hold is not to be acknowledged .

This is a phenomenon that needs more study because, as I've learned through involvement with the internet, it is among the more widespread of enforced, inviolable orthodoxies on what passes as lefty blogs and the cool class.   A lot of the phony excuse of a left  that inhabits so much of the blogosphere is really Rupert Murdoch's fondest dream,  the world as the toilet of the eternal 12-year-old-boy-assholes-because-we-can-be-jerks who dominate so many comment threads in so may places on the web.   And girls who want to be members of the boys club,  like Rebekah Brooks, only not as literate.   And yet these self-defined liberals wonder why they continually fail at politics*.   How could this not fail as liberalism when it is a dependable source of succor for the most degenerate forms of fascist depravity?

This whole thing is just an inversion of the pretensions of middle-brow aspirations in regard to high culture in previous times.  It's Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn as a strung out debauchee. This kind of bizarrely irrational, somewhat anxious, reverence on the basis of something being very, very naughty and/or very very stupid accrues to so many objects de fart today.  The biggest part of it is that one has to be observed doing it and never seen violating it with that most unfashionable of concepts, moral probity.   The phenomenon, the desperate desire to make a display of risk free transgression against social taboos that no one enforces or cares about and the frantic need try to find the last, rare instances of things disgusting enough to create the ephemeral frisson of excitement, has become far more tedious than the stuffiness of those who want to associate themselves with classical art.   In experiencing something as tiresome as The Aristocrats,  the effort of being seen or heard having the required reaction to it fulfills the tiresome quality of  its content by being a social duty.

As a gay man and an adult in the 1970s, who went to clubs the daring, transgressives-in-their-own-minds  would probably run away from,  I saw some things that a real Aristocrats act would entail.  As a young, foolish and passive observer, I'll note.  I went through that cycle and jumped off of it before Andrew Dice Clay came on the national scene**.   Some other day I might go into what that really meant and its particular stupidity.  For now,  having seen that,  The Aristocrats is a boring, stupid, puerile, pointless, inflamed sphincter of a movie and anyone who think's it's a great movie is too stupid and immature to take seriously on any subject.   But they're ready for the blog-time.

The real joke in all of this is that if you refused to  fall in line with the boys of the blogs on this you'd be the transgressor.    You can tell because they'll fuss at you like a purity campaigner from a 50s movie complaining about dirty words in library books.   You might even get banned in blogston.   That's what happened last night.

*  I will write an addendum this weekend about the clash between a young  female "skeptic" and some of the heroes of what passes as the rational class, of both sexes on these issues.   Jillette figured into that as did many of the cultural heroes of the liberalish-libertarian blogs.

**  A lot of the people I knew then who didn't died in the 1980s and 90s.   I'd hazard a guess that AIDs might have figured in some permutations of The Aristocrats over the years.

On Looking At The "Freethought Blogs"

P.Z. Myers, Greta Christina, Ophelia Benson....

I don't think  any identifiable group of people online have ever told me more often or more dogmatically how I was to think than "freethinkers".

Amazing Performance of Schoenberg's Friede Auf Erden

Uppsala Academy Chamber Choir

Stefan Parkman Conductor

On the Defeat in Wisconsin

The evidence is that democracy isn't safe in the media environment that we've got.   You can't allow mass media to feed the people on lies 365 days of the year and expect that they'll sift through those in order to make a rational decision that will be effectively beneficial.  I know that at this point the "more speech" dolts, who have been as useful to the corporate oligarchs as anyone, will bleat out their faith that "the good ideas will win."   At this point in our history that's just another lie because the experience of the past forty years proves that they ususally won't.  

While I acknowledge the efforts of those who worked to oust Walker and the Republican-fasicists, it was bound to fail in our media environment, especially with the time and other factors built into the recall process.  It was a losing battle from the start because of those.

Liberals will have to face the reality that the Jeffersonian slogans of free speech absolutism have been gamed by the fascists in their favor.  The oldfasioned conservatives who would deprive people of porn have been replaced by the fascists on the Supreme Court who will use "free speech" to destroy self-government of, by and for the people.   It is the courts who have handed the country over to corporate fascism, far more than the congress has.   They will let the porn merchants make tons of money with which to fund more Republican-fascist politicians and to buy seats for them.  That's just a bonus for their side in the process. The idea that the porn industry is some bulwark of liberalism is stupendously stupid, what they promote, people as objects for use, is the opposite of liberalism.   Free speech absolutism as "liberalism" is suicidal.   Democracy, liberalism, live on the the faith that objectifying people is what we struggle against and accurate information.  It dies by the cynical denial of moral values that so many confuse for liberalism.

Liberals will either wise up to the world as it is or liberals will never regain power.  I'm not optimistic on that point.

The Staple Singers Uncloudy Day

Stupid Atheist Tricks

From Sandwalk Blog

The Thought CriminalWednesday, May 30, 2012 8:19:00 AM
No time to listen to him this morning. Is it important?

"The answers, by the way, are no, no, and no. But you already knew that, didn't you?"

You "know" that? Don't you actually believe that?

If God did actually do 1 and 3, then the most determinedly atheistic and most rigorous of science (in my experience the one isn't anything like a guarantee of the other) couldn't do more than tell you how it was done and not more than that - even if full evidence and full analysis were available and possible, which they never will be. Science can't go beyond what the physical evidence can show and if God is the actual creator of the universe, that physical evidence can show no more than how God did it. What you think on either side of the question of if God did it can't be anything but belief or, as I suspect it usually is, preference.

2. is more problematic because it is a question about actual events in prehistory. We have no access to "original" humans, never mind access to their actions, understanding or intentions. We don't even have that in many non-original people living now. As even the biblical creation myth says that the first two people went bad fairly soon after they were first made, you'd have a mighty narrow range of entirely missing evidence to consider before you could know anything about it.

As someone who accepts evolution, you'd have to convince me you'd come up with a definitive definition of what African population constituted the "original" humans. And that would be before trying to divine what their actions, understandings and intentions were in order to assert their moral stature. Convincing me you'd identified the Adams and Eves would be a lot easier than the rest of it.

Of course, that is if you want to make a meaningful distinction between belief and knowledge. Muddying that line would seem to me to serve efforts like climate change denial, anti-vaccination fanaticism, the Intelligent Design industry, etc. Pretending to know what is merely believed can make someone arrogant, it can't make them any more accurate or persuasive to those not already predisposed.

ReplyDelete
Replies

Arek W.Wednesday, May 30, 2012 11:53:00 AM
The Thought Criminal said:

"Science can't go beyond what the physical evidence can show..."

Science can "see" everything humans can "see" (because science is made by humans) and much more (because it uses advanced technology).

If science cannot go beyond what the physical evidence can show, then how can you?

"If God did actually do 1 and 3, then the most determinedly atheistic and most rigorous of science (...) couldn't do more than tell you how it was done and not more than that..."

And how do you know if 1 and 3 were done by God and not by Unicorn?

Are you using "other way of knowing" (aka making stuff up) ?


The Thought CriminalWednesday, May 30, 2012 2:56:00 PM
Arek. I don't need science to tell me that the invasion of Iraq was a moral atrocity and a political disaster, which is good because science couldn't do that. I don't need science to know it's wrong to torture and murder children, which is just as good because science can't do that. I don't need science to know that the axioms and laws of mathematics are valid or that deductive logic is, which is good because science can't do that and, since science depends on those as prerequisites, I couldn't take science seriously without those. I can't even use science to know that it's a bad idea to lie about science or anything else because there is nothing in science that could possibly demonstrate that it is a bad idea.

And how do you know if 1 and 3.....

I wish atheists could comprehend the conditional mood, they don't seem to be able to twig onto it. Not to mention your need to cherry pick a partially elided -jeesh!- sentence out of a paragraph that ends, "What you think on either side of the question of if God did it can't be anything but belief or, as I suspect it usually is, preference."

It's an "other way of knowing" to believe that you can know 1, 2, or 3, instead of believing them. Which was the point of my comment.

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we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- these honored dead by using them as hostages against the living.

Abraham Lincoln, in his most revered speech, unwittingly provided a weapon that has been used since to kill many thousands of people. American soldiers and the countless others who, thought unmentionable in the United States, are indissolubly bound to our dead through the absolute requirements of justice and truth due to their being killed by the actions of the United States government, in our names, often giving Lincoln’s words as the reason.

How many times in the United States, as an excuse to continue the slaughter in Vietnam, Iraq and other wars of empire, has that weapon been used with the horrible potency generated by unthinking, unreflecting, coercive patriotism and rote reverence?

How many more people have died through the deployment of Lincoln’s words “should not have died in vain”?

Lincoln was honorable. He may have been the American President who had the truest sense of honor unbound by the conventions of aristocratic pretense. It is likely that he provided the weapon out of innocence borne of his great character and out of the requirement to address the necessities of the hard weeks during which he gave the speech, some of the worst in our history. The price the world has paid for those poetic words almost certainly wouldn’t have been worth their price to him, had he realized how they would be used by others.

People without morals and who have no honor, have no reservations about killing people. Given their readiness to kill without cause, saying they distort even the most sacred words for the purpose of killing more people is an idea shocking only to those in the habit of pretending they don’t see what they can plainly see.

Unfortunately, when you look down the list of American Presidents, you find a notable lack of character and in even some of those of high character it isn’t reliably coupled with wisdom. We can hope and pray that George W. Bush, utterly corrupt, utterly incompetent and reveling like a theatrical Caligula in his role as vicarious warrior, is the worst that our system can produce. I doubt that even with the example of the worst of his predecessors, Lincoln could have imagined someone as putrid as him attaining and holding the presidency. What he could have made of the regency of Cheney is even harder to imagine.

This week, as in all weeks of all of the imperial wars begun and continued by those who have no honor, no morality, no intention to allow the rule of The People, the tinny echo of Lincoln’s words as spoken by mimics sound through the helium balloon that diverts but refuses to inform the American People.

Those words from those mouths in the context of Bush’s war in Iraq do nothing to honor the dead, they prop them up before the camera as hostages, not to ransom a purpose for his criminal war, but as an emotional bribe to continue it until he can pass it and the blame for it onto someone else. It turns the deaths of those who have already died into a weapon against those who haven’t died yet. The honor due them is transformed into blackmail.

The plain truth is that those who have died in Bush’s war in Iraq have already died in vain.There is no further price that can redeem that terrible truth or to turn the utterly corrupt motives of those who have brought and continued this war to any more than a pantomime of greatness. The attempt only exposes the decay of our entire establishment, even those who say the words don’t believe them. Nothing that can be said can change that horrible truth and telling that truth will be punished because our ruling elite have buried democracy deeper than Robert Lincoln was forced to bury his father. He did so to prevent the theft of his corpse. Unfortunately he couldn’t do anything to protect his father’s soul from being stolen by criminals lower than grave robbers.

Note: If you ever see me mention the American dead without also mentioning those killed by the American government and its proxies, please point out the omission.

First posted March 29, 2008

For My Parents

All of the dead, some in uniform, parents, old, children too young.
Holes in families, empty houses. Shadows on people. A name in rock.


A person remembers someone. A town, a life.
Countries give speeches. Speeches about speeches.
Speeches about people. Too far away to know.


And I can't tell you. You had to see them. In their towns. Both sides.


First posted 2006

Nina Simone Rags and Old Iron

Gary Burton - Joy Spring 1961 and already great