I'm writing a new series, related to the topic of the one I wrote last August and September. I have decided to go more fully into one of the sections of that, one or more pieces that will take a lot of looking through my notes and trying to find online editions of things I researched the old fashioned way, from books.
It is possible that like that series, some of the parts of it will be posted out of order as they are completed.
Needless to say, I haven't yet gone back and reworked that series, as promised but still hope to put in a more final form what was written very quickly.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Dissolving The Best Thing About Us in the "Universal Acid" of Natural Selection
Part 1: The Problem of Goodness
In their eternal war against religious belief, one of the most popular arrows in the atheist's quiver is the problem of suffering, how could a God who was good allow so much and such extreme suffering. And it is a good point, one for which I'm unaware of an entirely satisfying answer. That is other than to point out that merely because we can't find a universally acceptable reason for suffering is no evidence that there isn't an entirely good reason for a good and loving God to also permit suffering. Our not being able to know something is no bar to its existence.
In their eternal war against religious belief, one of the most popular arrows in the atheist's quiver is the problem of suffering, how could a God who was good allow so much and such extreme suffering. And it is a good point, one for which I'm unaware of an entirely satisfying answer. That is other than to point out that merely because we can't find a universally acceptable reason for suffering is no evidence that there isn't an entirely good reason for a good and loving God to also permit suffering. Our not being able to know something is no bar to its existence.
One idea on that question which I've found somewhat persuasive was that suffering is part of God's giving us freedom of thought and an existence separate from God's own will. The idea that pain, used the right way, can provide a pathway away from selfishness and towards God is part of my cultural heritage as an Irish exCatholic. As much a part of that heritage is admitting that the ultimate answer to the question is a mystery, which is, actually, a sophisticated approach to such an incomprehensible problem. It is far more sophisticated than the faith of scientism that all can be explained with human science. As suffering is personal, perhaps any satisfying answer to the question of suffering is also personal. An answer that meets the needs of the individual might suffice for that person but it wouldn't satisfy others with different experience and thoughts.
Generosity as a problem is one that atheists have taken on with their ideological use of natural selection. Any atheists who don't hold the theory of natural selection as an even more popular arrow against religion, can avoid The Problem of Selflessness but I've yet to encounter one who would give it up. Among the many problems with their expropriation is that in their zeal to force the unselfish, generous behavior of human beings into their materialistic ideology they fall into a mental trap they always present as an exclusive fault in the religious, anthropocentricity. They insist on analyzing the behavior of non-humans as being the same thing as human generosity, clearly maintaining that they can know the minds of animals as foreign to us as the hymenoptera. And, surpassing any other such instance of human presumption I'm aware of, they claim their projection of human experience into ants and wasps is science.
Needless to say, all of this is not done without serious damage to the concepts and experience of generosity, selflessness and love, That abuse of making those into an abstraction in order to force them into the self-interested analysis that constitutes natural selection, is a serious issue. "Altruism" squeezed into natural selection is negated into merely a different order of selfishness. And calling the effort "science" gives those who do the illogical and impossible license to pretend they've explained what they, beyond a doubt, have not. I have to say that this is probably as serious a crime against one of the few truly fine things about us as has been done. I can't believe that any people who would willingly pervert the meaning of love in that way intend anything but a malignant purpose in doing it. Making love selfish, destroying the most basic meaning of love for their ideology, is a damning indictment of that ideology.
**** The case of Karl Marx's enthusiasm for Darwinism is particularly strange as Charles Darwin, in endorsing Ernst Haeckel's Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre supported Haeckel's view that Darwinism was a refutation of socialism and, in fact, supports an aristocratic system, not democracy. The overwhelming majority of Darwinists were capitalists, including Darwin. Many of them of them used Darwinism to support the most extreme versions of their ideology, Spencer, an obvious example. I haven't looked into that matter exhaustively but I think, for Marx, the inherent materialism of Darwinism accounted for his enthusiasm for it. If as obsessively careful a scholar as Marx can overlook the obvious truth, that other than it being materialistic, Darwinism is fundamentally destructive of his system, he has to have an overriding, extra-scholastic, motivation. I strongly suspect it is Marx's hostility to religious belief that accounts for his massive oversight. I have come to believe that hostility to religion has been an unstated motivation for a good part of the intellectual activity of the past two centuries.
In science, that is especially ironic, considering the obsessive, paranoid assertions of the ever present danger of religion being covertly inserted into science. I've repeatedly asked atheists for examples of the successful insertion of religion into the formal literature of science and have yet to have them provide support for their contention.
For the insertion of religion into science to work, it would have to be blatantly obvious because science can legitimately deal only with what the physical evidence shows and religion is not primarily concerned with physical evidence. Or, rather, science should be all about physical evidence. It frequently has not been, especially in the alleged study of behavior. Atheism, in the form of ideological materialism, can be far more successfully introduced into science unnoticed. I am not charging all atheists with doing that, some atheists within science have the highest professional integrity and many are simply entirely more interested in their scientific work than in a futile and, frankly, boring ideological war. Not all atheists have made that a major part of their formal work but many, especially in the allegedly scientific study of behavior, have inserted their ideology into their work and it's far past time that looking for that as a source of distortion is taken seriously.
But atheism, in the post-Darwin period, has its own enormous problem, that of unselfish, generous behavior among people. There is no way to reconcile acts and lives lived for the good of other people that costs the generous person, with natural selection. Strict natural selection would dictate that generous acts, unselfish acts, would constitute an impediment to survival of the generous individual, favoring those who benefited from their generosity over themselves. It is also a reproductive disadvantage. The theory of natural selection must see all individuals in terms of their being competitors in the struggle for survival and reproduction. It reduces all individuals to mere machines with an imperative to reproduce.
That problem was apparent from Darwin's time, it has been something wrestled against by some and actively admitted by others who championed selfishness and greed and the opposite of generosity as a means of the superior to flourish and the inferior to beneficially die. Eugenics, which arose directly and almost immediately from natural selection, was and still is one of the most popular themes of those who champion an extreme Darwinian interpretation. The history of biology, both before and after the Second World War is full of eugenicists some, such as Fischer, Haldane and Hamilton, directly advocating it, many others somewhat more coyly and covertly.
Even more obviously problematic and shocking were the assertions made by Darwin, Haeckel and others that infanticide, the murder by parents of their own children, was beneficial to the entire population. Anticipating what is said below, those assertions, especially made in The Descent of Man and in Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte - which Darwin cited with the highest praise exactly on the issue of infanticide - are a rather enormous problem for anyone who has tried to reconcile "altruism" with natural selection.
That problem was apparent from Darwin's time, it has been something wrestled against by some and actively admitted by others who championed selfishness and greed and the opposite of generosity as a means of the superior to flourish and the inferior to beneficially die. Eugenics, which arose directly and almost immediately from natural selection, was and still is one of the most popular themes of those who champion an extreme Darwinian interpretation. The history of biology, both before and after the Second World War is full of eugenicists some, such as Fischer, Haldane and Hamilton, directly advocating it, many others somewhat more coyly and covertly.
Even more obviously problematic and shocking were the assertions made by Darwin, Haeckel and others that infanticide, the murder by parents of their own children, was beneficial to the entire population. Anticipating what is said below, those assertions, especially made in The Descent of Man and in Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte - which Darwin cited with the highest praise exactly on the issue of infanticide - are a rather enormous problem for anyone who has tried to reconcile "altruism" with natural selection.
Given the pathological history of eugenics, nihilism, advocacy for infanticide and other and related products of this materialist confrontation with morals, responsible for producing enormous amounts of suffering and murder whenever it has gained legal and political influence, I'd much rather have the problem of suffering to have to explain.
Generosity as a problem is one that atheists have taken on with their ideological use of natural selection. Any atheists who don't hold the theory of natural selection as an even more popular arrow against religion, can avoid The Problem of Selflessness but I've yet to encounter one who would give it up. Among the many problems with their expropriation is that in their zeal to force the unselfish, generous behavior of human beings into their materialistic ideology they fall into a mental trap they always present as an exclusive fault in the religious, anthropocentricity. They insist on analyzing the behavior of non-humans as being the same thing as human generosity, clearly maintaining that they can know the minds of animals as foreign to us as the hymenoptera. And, surpassing any other such instance of human presumption I'm aware of, they claim their projection of human experience into ants and wasps is science.
Needless to say, all of this is not done without serious damage to the concepts and experience of generosity, selflessness and love, That abuse of making those into an abstraction in order to force them into the self-interested analysis that constitutes natural selection, is a serious issue. "Altruism" squeezed into natural selection is negated into merely a different order of selfishness. And calling the effort "science" gives those who do the illogical and impossible license to pretend they've explained what they, beyond a doubt, have not. I have to say that this is probably as serious a crime against one of the few truly fine things about us as has been done. I can't believe that any people who would willingly pervert the meaning of love in that way intend anything but a malignant purpose in doing it. Making love selfish, destroying the most basic meaning of love for their ideology, is a damning indictment of that ideology.
Ever since college when I first read about the then new discoveries of genetic drift, a far more powerful explanation of change in species over time, I've been puzzled over the widespread denial of the possibility that natural selection was not the ultimate and only mechanism of the origin of new species. If you want to enrage many biologists and, even more so, the Darwin fan club, point out that natural selection is just another theory which has changed fundamentally since Darwin first published it and which, like all theories, is vulnerable to questioning, further discoveries and, most heretically, doubt. Nothing must counter the presentation of Charles Darwin as an all seeing messiah of materialism. The ultra-Darwinists either are ignorant of or cover up the fact that Darwin, himself, believed in the inheritance of acquired traits, something that would make natural selection quite impossible*. It was not until the 1930s that natural selection was patched up with Mendelian genetics, providing it with a mechanism of inheritance that would allow it to be possible.
I used to think that the vehemence of those who insisted on the absolute supremacy of natural selection was due to professional interest and the inherent conservatism of those with a published record and a professional imperative to not disagree with the common received dogma. But I'm now convinced that is only part of the position that natural selection as an ideological requirement has among the respectable educated population. It is exactly its use as a tool of atheist ideology** that requires it to be held to be an absolute law of nature, the clearly wrong assertion that the fact of evolution is identical to the theory of natural selection.
Natural selection as the first universally influential explanatory mechanism of evolution and a scientific disproof of the literal interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis became one of the major cultural forces of the past century and a half. It being the first such weapon of academic and popular atheism, any proposal putting its usefulness at risk will be met with rage and derision. That has happened even when it has been atheists who come up with relatively minor modifications to the theory, such as Gould and Eldredge's Punctuated Equilibrium and Gould and Lewontin's Spandrels.
I've also come to believe that a great many of the purportedly scientific assertions of natural selection were motivated by their protection of natural selection as a weapon of atheism. It is absolutely essential for people doing that for natural selection to be the ultimate and only explanation of evolution, the thing that turns people into objects, every aspect of their lives, including their cultural and moral lives into mere expressions of physical objects and forces.
Having looked hard at the history of atheists using natural selection as a weapon against religious belief, I've been struck at how soon after On the Origin of Species was first published that Darwin's theory was used ideologically in that way, asserting the scientific nature of of that ideological use***. Huxley was one of the earliest, followed close on by Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spenser, Francis Galton, Karl Marx****,etc. Within the first decade of natural selection as a published theory, it had become the foundation of what was probably the most significant advance in atheist belief after the early atomists.
And it is still the major weapon wielded by atheism against religion, even as the vast majority of people who accept the reality of evolution, today, are religious believers. Evolution is only a problem for that minority of religious people who are scriptural fundamentalists. Other religious people, as early as Cardinal Newman and Asa Gray, found it was no problem for their religious belief. I remember in the pre-Vatican II years having nuns in the classroom, in full, traditional habit talking about how their religion was to be understood in terms of evolution. There are few things that infuriate many atheists more than a religious person who believes that evolution is the way in which God effected the creation of living beings on Earth. That belief breaks their favorite weapon against religion in half, it also deprives them of their ability to put all religious believers into the category of science-denying, ignorant, yahoos.
That stereotype, presenting religious believers in an easily understood object of ridicule has probably been far more useful to the use of Darwinism as atheist tool than science has been. And it is extremely ironic in my experience. In arguing about some of these issues with large numbers of atheists in the past several years, some of them with degrees in science topics, it has taken very little questioning to reveal that most of them are quite ignorant of the topic, their information more likely to be taken from popular media than primary source materials. Most of the foremost champions of Darwin have never read The Descent of Man and certainly have not noted or looked at his citations in that book. If they did that, alone, they could not believe what they imagine they know about many of their foremost cultural heroes. If they read the history of the idea of natural selection they could not pretend that the idea, held as the supreme force in evolution, has the power to explain a truly unselfish act done by a human being. They could not deny that the ideological theft of generosity "altruism" by Sociobiology and "Evolutionary" Psychology sacrifices the meaning of the best thing about us, our deepest and most compelling good, on their alter to natural selection.
That stereotype, presenting religious believers in an easily understood object of ridicule has probably been far more useful to the use of Darwinism as atheist tool than science has been. And it is extremely ironic in my experience. In arguing about some of these issues with large numbers of atheists in the past several years, some of them with degrees in science topics, it has taken very little questioning to reveal that most of them are quite ignorant of the topic, their information more likely to be taken from popular media than primary source materials. Most of the foremost champions of Darwin have never read The Descent of Man and certainly have not noted or looked at his citations in that book. If they did that, alone, they could not believe what they imagine they know about many of their foremost cultural heroes. If they read the history of the idea of natural selection they could not pretend that the idea, held as the supreme force in evolution, has the power to explain a truly unselfish act done by a human being. They could not deny that the ideological theft of generosity "altruism" by Sociobiology and "Evolutionary" Psychology sacrifices the meaning of the best thing about us, our deepest and most compelling good, on their alter to natural selection.
* The geneticist H. Allen Orr's elucidation of the problem is the best short one I know: This substrate neutrality argument is supremely important to Dennett. It -- and nothing else -- explains why selection can be lifted from its historical base in biology. It is what makes Darwinism so dangerous. But Dennett slips here. While it is true that many different kinds of substrate can be selected, it is simply not true that Darwinism works with any substrate, no matter what. Indeed Darwinism can't even explain old-fashioned biological evolution if the hereditary substrate doesn't behave just right. Evolution would quickly grind to a halt, for instance, if inheritance were blending, not particulate. With blending inheritance, the genetic material from two parents seamlessly blends together like different colored paints. With particulate Mendelian inheritance, genes from Mom and Dad remain forever distinct in Junior. This substrate problem was so acute that turn-of-the-century biologists -- all fans of blending inheritance -- concluded that Darwinism just can't work. Modern evolutionary genetics was born in 1930 when Sir Ronald Fisher cracked this problem: Population genetics shows that particulate Mendelian inheritance saves the day. It is just the kind of substrate needed for evolution by natural selection to work.
** As pointed out in an earlier post, the atheist blogger John Wilkins has admitted as much.
*** As a long time admirer of the great geneticist, Richard Lewontin, the frequent accusation made by today's ultra-Darwinists, that he inserts Marxist ideology in his critique of Sociobiology and "Evolutionary" Psychology, rings as supremely ironic. Malthusian ideology was the origin of Darwin's natural selection, its use by atheists to attack religion began immediately upon its publication and has continued, unabated ever since. Much of that ideological use of natural selection has been presented as science, a species of "science" which has its own history of being extremely liable to becoming fashionable before it is utterly junked.
** As pointed out in an earlier post, the atheist blogger John Wilkins has admitted as much.
*** As a long time admirer of the great geneticist, Richard Lewontin, the frequent accusation made by today's ultra-Darwinists, that he inserts Marxist ideology in his critique of Sociobiology and "Evolutionary" Psychology, rings as supremely ironic. Malthusian ideology was the origin of Darwin's natural selection, its use by atheists to attack religion began immediately upon its publication and has continued, unabated ever since. Much of that ideological use of natural selection has been presented as science, a species of "science" which has its own history of being extremely liable to becoming fashionable before it is utterly junked.
**** The case of Karl Marx's enthusiasm for Darwinism is particularly strange as Charles Darwin, in endorsing Ernst Haeckel's Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre supported Haeckel's view that Darwinism was a refutation of socialism and, in fact, supports an aristocratic system, not democracy. The overwhelming majority of Darwinists were capitalists, including Darwin. Many of them of them used Darwinism to support the most extreme versions of their ideology, Spencer, an obvious example. I haven't looked into that matter exhaustively but I think, for Marx, the inherent materialism of Darwinism accounted for his enthusiasm for it. If as obsessively careful a scholar as Marx can overlook the obvious truth, that other than it being materialistic, Darwinism is fundamentally destructive of his system, he has to have an overriding, extra-scholastic, motivation. I strongly suspect it is Marx's hostility to religious belief that accounts for his massive oversight. I have come to believe that hostility to religion has been an unstated motivation for a good part of the intellectual activity of the past two centuries.
In science, that is especially ironic, considering the obsessive, paranoid assertions of the ever present danger of religion being covertly inserted into science. I've repeatedly asked atheists for examples of the successful insertion of religion into the formal literature of science and have yet to have them provide support for their contention.
For the insertion of religion into science to work, it would have to be blatantly obvious because science can legitimately deal only with what the physical evidence shows and religion is not primarily concerned with physical evidence. Or, rather, science should be all about physical evidence. It frequently has not been, especially in the alleged study of behavior. Atheism, in the form of ideological materialism, can be far more successfully introduced into science unnoticed. I am not charging all atheists with doing that, some atheists within science have the highest professional integrity and many are simply entirely more interested in their scientific work than in a futile and, frankly, boring ideological war. Not all atheists have made that a major part of their formal work but many, especially in the allegedly scientific study of behavior, have inserted their ideology into their work and it's far past time that looking for that as a source of distortion is taken seriously.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
More Fun With Dialectical Materialism
When I sent yesterday's post to a friend who then looked up the SWP, the "Socialist" Workers Party, he recommended the Wikipedia article, saying it was a perfect example of what I was talking about.
While it's Wiki and, therefore, of unknowable accuracy, it seems plausible as a history typical of the communist presence in the United States in all of their "scientific" self-important silliness, impotent uselessness, baroque factionalism, adolescent and entirely non-idealistic jockeying for dominance, petty jealousy, and just about complete failure to do a single thing other than those. The parts about the various attempts at infiltrating and taking over various groups, including, disastrously, actual unions, is typical of communist groups. I can think of nothing that would have hindered unions more than becoming wound up with the eternal, divisive idiocy of the communist parties. "Union makes us strong" has not been the practice of the communists at any point in their history.
You can read it for yourself and ask yourself what sane person, looking at that kind of stuff wouldn't conclude those people were nut cases. Look at what they're up to today, no, what they're talking, not doing. They don't do much else. They've learned nothing from the lessons of their own history, odd where their "scientific" view of history has led them.
While it's Wiki and, therefore, of unknowable accuracy, it seems plausible as a history typical of the communist presence in the United States in all of their "scientific" self-important silliness, impotent uselessness, baroque factionalism, adolescent and entirely non-idealistic jockeying for dominance, petty jealousy, and just about complete failure to do a single thing other than those. The parts about the various attempts at infiltrating and taking over various groups, including, disastrously, actual unions, is typical of communist groups. I can think of nothing that would have hindered unions more than becoming wound up with the eternal, divisive idiocy of the communist parties. "Union makes us strong" has not been the practice of the communists at any point in their history.
You can read it for yourself and ask yourself what sane person, looking at that kind of stuff wouldn't conclude those people were nut cases. Look at what they're up to today, no, what they're talking, not doing. They don't do much else. They've learned nothing from the lessons of their own history, odd where their "scientific" view of history has led them.
Friday, February 1, 2013
From an Old Blog Post Apropos of Today's
A rule of thumb: any political party that has produced more splinters than office holders defines “politically failed”.
On A Venerable Beau
Still hovering round the fair at sixty-four
Unfit for love, unable to give o’re.
A flesh fly, that just flutters on the wing,
Awake to buzz, but not alive to sting;
Brisk where he cannot, backward where he can,
The teasing ghost of the departed man.
David Mallet 18th cen.
Being Done With The Sterile Strife of the Communists
Expanding on a theme I touched on the other day, let me break this to you, after more than a century of efforts the myriad and eternally splintering array of communist parties in the United States have never produced and will never produce anything of use to working people and poor people.
Their use has been entirely to the benefit of the enemies of workers and the poor, as an all too willing weapon against progress. I say "all too willing" because much if not most of the material turning them into weapons against progress have been provided by the communists, themselves.
Other than that the one and only thing that the communists have achieved is their own victimhood during the red scares of the past century. Yes, they were the victims of a violation of their civil liberties by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, Red Channels, the American Legion, the Hollywood Black list and many others who targeted communists and anyone they could tar with an association with communism. I grew up on stories of that victim hood, deplored the members of the HUAC and Judge Kaufman and Irving Saypol and, especially David Greenglass. And I still do, though I also deplore the role that Julius Rosenberg had in nuclear proliferation, as well.
That victimization is certainly wrong but it is certainly not on the same order as that of racial, ethnic and other minority groups. And a lot of it was the results of provocation. Their idiotic, futile, counterproductive agitprop handed their enemies a gold mine of quotations to use. And that junk always was obviously futile and stupid. It was and is designed mostly to get attention for one tiny faction of communists or a single communist from other members of tiny cults of communism. Looking at a lot of the websites of various communist parties, I see the same old absurdly overblown wind that is more likely to elicit rolled eyes than progress that has marked communist rhetoric since Marx wrote his failed manifesto in 1848. For example:
The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA has taken on the responsibility to lead revolution in the U.S., the belly of the imperialist beast, as its principal share of the world revolution and the ultimate aim of communism. This Party is built on and takes as its foundation the new synthesis of communism that has been brought forward through the body of work and method and approach of Bob Avakian. Its members are united in their profound desire for a radically different and better world, and their understanding of the need for revolution to get to that world. They have dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to revolution, and on the basis of that they channel their individual abilities and passions to the cause and needs of this revolution.
Let it be asked, aren't you reassured that they've taken on that responsibility? If you want to go to their website for even more absurd, empty and futile rhetoric, they're easy enough to find. I'd especially recommend looking at the link to Bob Avakian "The Vision, The Works, The Leadership for a New Stage of Communist Revolution", and then comparing it to the rhetoric of the LaRouche cult, remembering that Lyndon LaRouche began as a Trot and a member of the SWP.
You could look on just about any other communist party site in the United States and other English speaking countries and reproduce the tedious experience of reading the absurd blather dozens of times over. I have not found any record of success in even those parties that have either been in existence for decades not to mention in those tiny cells that viciously and vituperatively split from them to assert their higher correctness and right to lead the revolution. Some come with long atheological arguments based in Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, etc. etc. etc. proving their case with admirable and excruciating citation and explanation. I'm unaware of any medieval theology that quite matches some of those in absurdly detailed assertion.
Other than the litanies of the historical victimhood, the other thing that the communists have consciously achieved was gulling the left into feeling sorry for them and championing their rights in all of their anti-democratic, dictator promoting, divisive futility. In one of my earliest pieces I said I won't be fair to fascists, I won't be nice to Nazis. You can add that I won't cooperate with communists, I won't be co-opted by them. The Revolutionary Communist Party is a Maoist party, Mao was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people and the enslavement of hundreds of millions. His incompetence in dictating agricultural practices on the basis of his theories was a total disaster. Others among the communists are Leninists or Stalinists or Trotskyites, all men who either had oceans of blood on their hands or would have if they'd not been shoved aside, in the case of Trotsky. There is no reason to ignore that, there is every reason that acknowledging it is as much a moral requirement as acknowledging the crimes of the Nazis and fascists.
And for all of that liberals of the past and today are stupid to give them a single second more or our efforts. Just as I hold that we owe Nazis nothing and they should assert their free speech rights to advocate murder and slavery and war without our time and resources, I hold we owe communists nothing more as they advocate the same, exact things. I don't think we owe them so much as the bucket of spit that so many an amicus brief to the Supreme Court has been.
I am a socialist, I believe that the workers, those who produce wealth, should be the sole owners of the means of production. I hold that is a fundamental human right and the privileges of capital are nothing but a form of legalized theft. It is as a socialist that I particularly resent the position of the communists in the history of the past two centuries. They've done more to discredit socialism than all of the capitalists put together.
A Note About The Last Stalinist
During the Senate campaign of Ned Lamont against the putrid and thankfully gone Joe Lieberman, Lieberman's supporters and the official Republicans went after him due to him being the unfortunate nephew of the late Corliss Lamont. I read on several blogs the assertion that Corliss Lamont was not a Stalinist, presumably because the people bringing that up weren't credible. Unfortunately, there was no honest debate to be had on that. Corliss Lamont was probably the last Stalinist in the United States, active in denying the atrocities committed under Stalin right up till he died and the Kremlin started denouncing his crimes. As late as 1952 Corliss Lamont was publishing The Myth of Soviet Aggression, no doubt for the fertile grounds he imagined existed in the U.S. Of course Ned Lamont had no responsibility for his foolish uncle, the trust fund baby Stalinist. But any leftist who misrepresents Corliss Lamont is responsible for lying about history. It also requires asking if there isn't a corrupt motive in pretending his record isn't what it so obviously is.
Corliss Lamont's hands are all over all kinds of groups which he more or less bought or bought influence in with his money, Including the ACLU and the Humanists for a good part of their history. Any group that had a major association with a supporter of a fascist dictator would rightly be seen as needing to distance themselves and explain themselves. On the basis of the moral imperative that someone who is responsible for a genocidal mass murder is a genocidal mass murderer and those who support them are supporting genocide, those institutions that had a major association with Corliss Lamont really need to clarify things.
Their use has been entirely to the benefit of the enemies of workers and the poor, as an all too willing weapon against progress. I say "all too willing" because much if not most of the material turning them into weapons against progress have been provided by the communists, themselves.
Other than that the one and only thing that the communists have achieved is their own victimhood during the red scares of the past century. Yes, they were the victims of a violation of their civil liberties by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, Red Channels, the American Legion, the Hollywood Black list and many others who targeted communists and anyone they could tar with an association with communism. I grew up on stories of that victim hood, deplored the members of the HUAC and Judge Kaufman and Irving Saypol and, especially David Greenglass. And I still do, though I also deplore the role that Julius Rosenberg had in nuclear proliferation, as well.
That victimization is certainly wrong but it is certainly not on the same order as that of racial, ethnic and other minority groups. And a lot of it was the results of provocation. Their idiotic, futile, counterproductive agitprop handed their enemies a gold mine of quotations to use. And that junk always was obviously futile and stupid. It was and is designed mostly to get attention for one tiny faction of communists or a single communist from other members of tiny cults of communism. Looking at a lot of the websites of various communist parties, I see the same old absurdly overblown wind that is more likely to elicit rolled eyes than progress that has marked communist rhetoric since Marx wrote his failed manifesto in 1848. For example:
The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA has taken on the responsibility to lead revolution in the U.S., the belly of the imperialist beast, as its principal share of the world revolution and the ultimate aim of communism. This Party is built on and takes as its foundation the new synthesis of communism that has been brought forward through the body of work and method and approach of Bob Avakian. Its members are united in their profound desire for a radically different and better world, and their understanding of the need for revolution to get to that world. They have dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to revolution, and on the basis of that they channel their individual abilities and passions to the cause and needs of this revolution.
Let it be asked, aren't you reassured that they've taken on that responsibility? If you want to go to their website for even more absurd, empty and futile rhetoric, they're easy enough to find. I'd especially recommend looking at the link to Bob Avakian "The Vision, The Works, The Leadership for a New Stage of Communist Revolution", and then comparing it to the rhetoric of the LaRouche cult, remembering that Lyndon LaRouche began as a Trot and a member of the SWP.
You could look on just about any other communist party site in the United States and other English speaking countries and reproduce the tedious experience of reading the absurd blather dozens of times over. I have not found any record of success in even those parties that have either been in existence for decades not to mention in those tiny cells that viciously and vituperatively split from them to assert their higher correctness and right to lead the revolution. Some come with long atheological arguments based in Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, etc. etc. etc. proving their case with admirable and excruciating citation and explanation. I'm unaware of any medieval theology that quite matches some of those in absurdly detailed assertion.
Other than the litanies of the historical victimhood, the other thing that the communists have consciously achieved was gulling the left into feeling sorry for them and championing their rights in all of their anti-democratic, dictator promoting, divisive futility. In one of my earliest pieces I said I won't be fair to fascists, I won't be nice to Nazis. You can add that I won't cooperate with communists, I won't be co-opted by them. The Revolutionary Communist Party is a Maoist party, Mao was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people and the enslavement of hundreds of millions. His incompetence in dictating agricultural practices on the basis of his theories was a total disaster. Others among the communists are Leninists or Stalinists or Trotskyites, all men who either had oceans of blood on their hands or would have if they'd not been shoved aside, in the case of Trotsky. There is no reason to ignore that, there is every reason that acknowledging it is as much a moral requirement as acknowledging the crimes of the Nazis and fascists.
And for all of that liberals of the past and today are stupid to give them a single second more or our efforts. Just as I hold that we owe Nazis nothing and they should assert their free speech rights to advocate murder and slavery and war without our time and resources, I hold we owe communists nothing more as they advocate the same, exact things. I don't think we owe them so much as the bucket of spit that so many an amicus brief to the Supreme Court has been.
I am a socialist, I believe that the workers, those who produce wealth, should be the sole owners of the means of production. I hold that is a fundamental human right and the privileges of capital are nothing but a form of legalized theft. It is as a socialist that I particularly resent the position of the communists in the history of the past two centuries. They've done more to discredit socialism than all of the capitalists put together.
A Note About The Last Stalinist
During the Senate campaign of Ned Lamont against the putrid and thankfully gone Joe Lieberman, Lieberman's supporters and the official Republicans went after him due to him being the unfortunate nephew of the late Corliss Lamont. I read on several blogs the assertion that Corliss Lamont was not a Stalinist, presumably because the people bringing that up weren't credible. Unfortunately, there was no honest debate to be had on that. Corliss Lamont was probably the last Stalinist in the United States, active in denying the atrocities committed under Stalin right up till he died and the Kremlin started denouncing his crimes. As late as 1952 Corliss Lamont was publishing The Myth of Soviet Aggression, no doubt for the fertile grounds he imagined existed in the U.S. Of course Ned Lamont had no responsibility for his foolish uncle, the trust fund baby Stalinist. But any leftist who misrepresents Corliss Lamont is responsible for lying about history. It also requires asking if there isn't a corrupt motive in pretending his record isn't what it so obviously is.
Corliss Lamont's hands are all over all kinds of groups which he more or less bought or bought influence in with his money, Including the ACLU and the Humanists for a good part of their history. Any group that had a major association with a supporter of a fascist dictator would rightly be seen as needing to distance themselves and explain themselves. On the basis of the moral imperative that someone who is responsible for a genocidal mass murder is a genocidal mass murderer and those who support them are supporting genocide, those institutions that had a major association with Corliss Lamont really need to clarify things.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Political Identity As If People And Other Living Things Mattered
Someone has asked me why I'm always going on about people being considered as objects, so I'll go into this again.
It was about a decade ago, shortly after I went online and started visiting leftish websites, reading, sometimes in horror, some of the things that I read there.
One day, reading a comment by an old-line lefty who I guess was about my age, to the effect that science had proven free will is a myth, I realized that was a belief which was fundamentally destructive of anything that can usefully be considered to constitute liberalism. If people are merely objects then there is nothing wrong with treating them unequally, in terms of usefulness, of exploiting them for any and all purposes. If people are held to be merely objects then the only rule which will prevail is what stronger people in any situation can get away with doing to them. People will be subjected to the same legal and social rules that have governed peoples' use of animals and plants. That is unless something higher than objectification and utility is forced on those who are reluctantly required to treat them as more than that.
I suppose another thing that led to that moment of clarity came from being exposed to more porn than I'd ever seen in my prior three-plus decades in the gay community. Which explains my presumed apostasy on that issue as well.
There is something seriously wrong with an analysis of political identity which would allow someone allegedly on the left to maintain positions that are identical in their effect on living beings to those of Nazis and fascists. I have heard people held to be on the far left who have not only denied the mass murders, attempted genocides and slave labor under various "leftist" governments, on some occasions I've heard such "leftists" admit those but excuse them as having served some kind of progress. As reasonable a lefty as the late, lamented Alexander Cockburn excused Stalin as not being as bad as Hitler because you could serve in the Red Army while being Jewish. I'm not aware of him ever going over the "Jewish Doctors Plot", Stalin's last paranoid attempt at genocide, cut short only by his death. Even the Soviet government had to publish an exoneration of Jewish doctors on that one, several years before Khrushchev's denunciation of the decades of murders by Stalin. That famous speech was delivered much to the horror of so many Marxists in the West who had spent those decades denying that those were happening. Why that, alone, didn't discredit them as much as the revelation of the Nazis massive war crimes did his apologists strikes me as being a crucial issue in why liberalism has failed for so long. I believe that there is a lot about how we need to change things to be learned in that history.
Marxism and its various sects as the final destiny on the ray pointing left from the political center has always been an ideologically fraudulent ruse, useful to both the Marxists and the far right, damaging mostly to those who legitimately hold that position. The fraudulence is based in the fact that both Marxists and fascists hold the same basic ideology that people are objects. From that position their entire, real world, political identity unfolds. Both will make some kind of weird, quasi-mystical pronouncements about "the people" in terms of nationality or as a mass but only as a physical force of nature which might be diverted in this or that direction, Expending many individuals within that mass to accomplish their ends is seen as a good, which also turn out to be not all that different when it's goal is a dictatorship of "the people" or rule by a centralized power. Marxists who hold that the tens of millions of murders BY MARXISTS, under Stalin or Mao somehow serve a more important purpose have a vision of the ultimate goal that isn't much different from what was supposed to happen after the German nation ruled the world. In what is, I'm sure, an extremely controversial but entirely supportable point, it wasn't much different from what Charles Darwin seems to have imagined would happen when the "weaker members" including entire races of the human species were killed by the stronger. Only, in his case, since it was Brits he imagined among the evolutionary winners, nice polite people are required to ignore he said the same thing.
My proposal is to judge political identity based on the extent to which people are not held to be objects but to be, as the American philosopher Paul Weiss once said, " a locus of rights". But, also controversially, I reject the attempt to do that in secular terms because I have seen how the concept of people as the equal holders of real, inherent rights has fared under atheist regimes of thought. I have absolutely no faith that a secular view of people will ever continue to hold that concept as an absolute reality, anymore. Not after witnessing the left's decisively and damnably mild reaction to the revelation of the crimes of Stalin, Mao and their client states during my lifetime on the left. I won't ignore that failure out of some alleged "higher purpose".
Secularism should be the sole preserve of a democratic government of the wonderfully diverse individual people who make up its only legitimate basis. That requirement is a requirement of equality as well as efficiently removing some potential areas of contention from the mechanisms of government. Secularism isn't, itself, some kind of spiritual goal and ideal. It cannot and will not ever be a legitimate requirement for human beings. The People are the only legitimate source of government. But it is a fundamental denial of the humanity of those people to deny their spiritual and, yes, RELIGIOUS identities. It would be as legitimate to deny the genders, races, nationalities and sexual identities of people, the other categories that have wisely been acknowledged by some of the best and most idealistically democratic laws we have ever adopted. If religious liberals self-censor their words, as has so frequently happened on the left in the face of atheist coercion, their political purpose is subverted. When those who enforce the suppression of religious thought are the kind of materialists who hold that people are objects with little to no individual importance and that the masses are a force of nature, all important, then the left will find itself impotently supporting the most anti-liberal of ideas and policies and even some of the greatest mass murderers in history. The people murdered by Stalin and Mao are as dead as those murdered by the Nazis and the Rios Montt junta in Guatamala. There was a reason that the fascists in Central America targeted religious liberals.
If you're going to insist on a line of political identity, the resulting body counts of different ideological positions are a far more legitimate factor in placing people on it than the economic babbling of theoreticians. We, on the real left, have got nothing in common with people who make excuses for the mass murders of Mao or Stalin. We never did, we will never be credible as long as we allow them to pretend we do. Maybe refusing to go along with that criminal negligence will get them to reconsider. It did me.
UPDATE: A perceptive reader has pointed out that the title ironically refers to people as "things". I'll have to admit you got me. When I came up with it I was thinking of the old poster about war being unhealthy for people and other living things as well as the subtitle of Small is Beautiful "economics as if people mattered". I'll try to be less artsy and more accurate, at least till I forget this lesson.
It was about a decade ago, shortly after I went online and started visiting leftish websites, reading, sometimes in horror, some of the things that I read there.
One day, reading a comment by an old-line lefty who I guess was about my age, to the effect that science had proven free will is a myth, I realized that was a belief which was fundamentally destructive of anything that can usefully be considered to constitute liberalism. If people are merely objects then there is nothing wrong with treating them unequally, in terms of usefulness, of exploiting them for any and all purposes. If people are held to be merely objects then the only rule which will prevail is what stronger people in any situation can get away with doing to them. People will be subjected to the same legal and social rules that have governed peoples' use of animals and plants. That is unless something higher than objectification and utility is forced on those who are reluctantly required to treat them as more than that.
I suppose another thing that led to that moment of clarity came from being exposed to more porn than I'd ever seen in my prior three-plus decades in the gay community. Which explains my presumed apostasy on that issue as well.
There is something seriously wrong with an analysis of political identity which would allow someone allegedly on the left to maintain positions that are identical in their effect on living beings to those of Nazis and fascists. I have heard people held to be on the far left who have not only denied the mass murders, attempted genocides and slave labor under various "leftist" governments, on some occasions I've heard such "leftists" admit those but excuse them as having served some kind of progress. As reasonable a lefty as the late, lamented Alexander Cockburn excused Stalin as not being as bad as Hitler because you could serve in the Red Army while being Jewish. I'm not aware of him ever going over the "Jewish Doctors Plot", Stalin's last paranoid attempt at genocide, cut short only by his death. Even the Soviet government had to publish an exoneration of Jewish doctors on that one, several years before Khrushchev's denunciation of the decades of murders by Stalin. That famous speech was delivered much to the horror of so many Marxists in the West who had spent those decades denying that those were happening. Why that, alone, didn't discredit them as much as the revelation of the Nazis massive war crimes did his apologists strikes me as being a crucial issue in why liberalism has failed for so long. I believe that there is a lot about how we need to change things to be learned in that history.
Marxism and its various sects as the final destiny on the ray pointing left from the political center has always been an ideologically fraudulent ruse, useful to both the Marxists and the far right, damaging mostly to those who legitimately hold that position. The fraudulence is based in the fact that both Marxists and fascists hold the same basic ideology that people are objects. From that position their entire, real world, political identity unfolds. Both will make some kind of weird, quasi-mystical pronouncements about "the people" in terms of nationality or as a mass but only as a physical force of nature which might be diverted in this or that direction, Expending many individuals within that mass to accomplish their ends is seen as a good, which also turn out to be not all that different when it's goal is a dictatorship of "the people" or rule by a centralized power. Marxists who hold that the tens of millions of murders BY MARXISTS, under Stalin or Mao somehow serve a more important purpose have a vision of the ultimate goal that isn't much different from what was supposed to happen after the German nation ruled the world. In what is, I'm sure, an extremely controversial but entirely supportable point, it wasn't much different from what Charles Darwin seems to have imagined would happen when the "weaker members" including entire races of the human species were killed by the stronger. Only, in his case, since it was Brits he imagined among the evolutionary winners, nice polite people are required to ignore he said the same thing.
My proposal is to judge political identity based on the extent to which people are not held to be objects but to be, as the American philosopher Paul Weiss once said, " a locus of rights". But, also controversially, I reject the attempt to do that in secular terms because I have seen how the concept of people as the equal holders of real, inherent rights has fared under atheist regimes of thought. I have absolutely no faith that a secular view of people will ever continue to hold that concept as an absolute reality, anymore. Not after witnessing the left's decisively and damnably mild reaction to the revelation of the crimes of Stalin, Mao and their client states during my lifetime on the left. I won't ignore that failure out of some alleged "higher purpose".
Secularism should be the sole preserve of a democratic government of the wonderfully diverse individual people who make up its only legitimate basis. That requirement is a requirement of equality as well as efficiently removing some potential areas of contention from the mechanisms of government. Secularism isn't, itself, some kind of spiritual goal and ideal. It cannot and will not ever be a legitimate requirement for human beings. The People are the only legitimate source of government. But it is a fundamental denial of the humanity of those people to deny their spiritual and, yes, RELIGIOUS identities. It would be as legitimate to deny the genders, races, nationalities and sexual identities of people, the other categories that have wisely been acknowledged by some of the best and most idealistically democratic laws we have ever adopted. If religious liberals self-censor their words, as has so frequently happened on the left in the face of atheist coercion, their political purpose is subverted. When those who enforce the suppression of religious thought are the kind of materialists who hold that people are objects with little to no individual importance and that the masses are a force of nature, all important, then the left will find itself impotently supporting the most anti-liberal of ideas and policies and even some of the greatest mass murderers in history. The people murdered by Stalin and Mao are as dead as those murdered by the Nazis and the Rios Montt junta in Guatamala. There was a reason that the fascists in Central America targeted religious liberals.
If you're going to insist on a line of political identity, the resulting body counts of different ideological positions are a far more legitimate factor in placing people on it than the economic babbling of theoreticians. We, on the real left, have got nothing in common with people who make excuses for the mass murders of Mao or Stalin. We never did, we will never be credible as long as we allow them to pretend we do. Maybe refusing to go along with that criminal negligence will get them to reconsider. It did me.
UPDATE: A perceptive reader has pointed out that the title ironically refers to people as "things". I'll have to admit you got me. When I came up with it I was thinking of the old poster about war being unhealthy for people and other living things as well as the subtitle of Small is Beautiful "economics as if people mattered". I'll try to be less artsy and more accurate, at least till I forget this lesson.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
About The Inviolable St. Penn Jillette and his Faithful
Contrary to a post I did the other day, an e-mail filter doesn't catch everything and so the outraged screed of a fan of that well known scientist and intellectual, Penn Jillette, got into the Inbox. The next one using that particular stream of characters won't.
I should do this as an update to yesterdays post but, really, he's so obnoxious, such an asshole and his fans are so stupidly fawning and adoring of him and they get so flipped out over someone irreverently doing to their demi-god what he has made a career out of doing, saying bad things about someone, that I'm going to take the opportunity to point out yet again that Penn Jillette is one of the atheist pseudo-skeptics who are always telling everyone in the world how stupid they are for NOT BELIEVING EXACTLY WHAT PENN JILLETTE AND THE REST OF THE ATHEIST PSEUDO-SKEPTICS ORDER THEM TO BELIEVE! He also poses as a freethinking libertarian when what he really is is a cowardly intellectual bully who demands that people think in his rigid, primitively scientistic materialist way, demanding that and demeaning non-conformists from the safety of venues he and his production team are in control of or where he will be allowed to scream and bluster like others who share his particular field at the high compensation-sub basement quality ass end of the show-biz industry like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Mike Savage. As a comedian, he is, as pointed out yesterday, only able to get other conceited assholes like himself to laugh at other people so they can pretend they are superior to them while missing, completely, that the only real joke is that he appeals mostly to ignorant boys like him who have never progressed emotionally past the terrible twos and never progressed intellectually past the 8th grade. And I don't mean 8th graders who were mature for their age.
Now, if any of you Penn Jillette fans would like me to elaborate and tell you what I really think of him, yes, I can do that.
I should do this as an update to yesterdays post but, really, he's so obnoxious, such an asshole and his fans are so stupidly fawning and adoring of him and they get so flipped out over someone irreverently doing to their demi-god what he has made a career out of doing, saying bad things about someone, that I'm going to take the opportunity to point out yet again that Penn Jillette is one of the atheist pseudo-skeptics who are always telling everyone in the world how stupid they are for NOT BELIEVING EXACTLY WHAT PENN JILLETTE AND THE REST OF THE ATHEIST PSEUDO-SKEPTICS ORDER THEM TO BELIEVE! He also poses as a freethinking libertarian when what he really is is a cowardly intellectual bully who demands that people think in his rigid, primitively scientistic materialist way, demanding that and demeaning non-conformists from the safety of venues he and his production team are in control of or where he will be allowed to scream and bluster like others who share his particular field at the high compensation-sub basement quality ass end of the show-biz industry like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Mike Savage. As a comedian, he is, as pointed out yesterday, only able to get other conceited assholes like himself to laugh at other people so they can pretend they are superior to them while missing, completely, that the only real joke is that he appeals mostly to ignorant boys like him who have never progressed emotionally past the terrible twos and never progressed intellectually past the 8th grade. And I don't mean 8th graders who were mature for their age.
Now, if any of you Penn Jillette fans would like me to elaborate and tell you what I really think of him, yes, I can do that.
Monday, January 28, 2013
On Being Required By Atheists To Worship George Carlin
The Thought Criminal began the month noting how one is supposed to genuflect when John Lennon's dyspeptic atheist dirge "Imagine" is intoned by the talentless and idealess, pointing that out to apparently great umbrage by the hiply cynical and atheist. Which is funny in itself. I've been noting that kind of thing for as long as I've been online when I first noticed the ironic truth of that kind of thing. Noting the fact that John Lennon was a heck of a lot less talented on his own than he was when he was writing songs with Paul and others and that none of the frequently Drab Four were all that talented, will elicit a febrile outrage which is usually the preserve of the insanely nationalistic and fundamentalist.
Last summer I noted the same about the consequences of being honest about the professional asshole, hate-talking thief of talented magician's material in order to destroy its intended value, and entirely unimportant self-promoting non-intellectual , definitely non-scientist, Penn Jillette. One is not to point out that Jillette is an asshole's asshole and that Teller is probably saved from exposing himself as the same only because his shtick is to keep his mouth shut.
The list of atheist idols one is not to diss on pain of being declared to have cooties includes the oneest of one-trick ponies Douglass Adams, the citation of whom is about as sure a sign of lazy slackerdom with pretensions of being intellectual as is currently available Really, aren't we all just waiting for the next incarnation of "Hitchhikers Guide" about as much as we are the inevitable "Oxygentank" tour of The Rolling Stones if Mick and at least one of his elderly Stones can breathe and hobble long enough? Adam's estate has been milking that property for many millions of times what it was ever worth.
The same is true in a smaller way for the estates of two other idols of atheist culture, Carl Sagan and the absolutely putrid neo-con and intellectual hooker, Christopher Hitchens. But they'll never reach the same stature as Lennon, Jillette and Adams. I suspect that another professional asshole of limited talent, Ricky Gervaise, will join the panthon of the Prometheus set. The formula is that you have to be an intellectually unchallenging, anti-religious hate talker who makes the unintellectual, hate talking atheist feel that they're superior to the vast majority of the population. Having a Brit accent is a big plus because the Brits produce an enormous number of the type and so many of the American atheists are rather shameless Anglophiles but it's not strictly required. At least not on this side of the Atlantic.
For the past few weeks I've been experimenting on blog atheists using another of the tediously over-cited gods of the godless, George Carlin. I remember his early stuff on TV, which was kind of funny. But he was never going to be a great comic on the strength of that. His beatnik themed act was pretty limited and he lacked the original genius and power of a Richard Pryor or Lilly Tomlin. As he got older and, I'd guess, increasingly desperate at the limits of his talent he started developing his anti-religious routine. He had enough experience and just enough intelligence to see the possibilities of getting hold of the same market share that Bill Maher has harvested after Carlin's death.
I heard Carlin doing it before I realized that he was getting more and more boring as he became preachier and nastier and appealed to a bunch of snobs based on their self-aggrandizing sterotypes of the vast majority of humanity. Cynicism doesn't have any power to change things - the original conceit of the Carlin style of humor - because it, frankly, despises most people. It can get the conceited to laugh at other people, which is far easier than even taking a pie in the pants but it is entirely useless to change anything.
Really, that is the supposed reason for that kind of alleged humor, that it is useful to defeat the fascists. And that reason is a demonstrable fraud. Looking back at the far, far more talented cabaret acts of the pre-Nazi period, really some of the most brilliant of performers and writers in the genre, it was less than useless in preventing the catastrophe that was so obviously coming. That's not an original idea, I've read other people who also noticed how that didn't work in the inter-war period. Nor will it ever because cynicism is an expression of the negation of values, which underlies fascism. You can't fight cynicism with cynicism. Trying that can only enhance cynicism, not anything else. The increasing cynicism of alleged comedy in the 1970s led to the past thirty years of conservative resurgence here. It undermined Jimmy Carter and did nothing to prevent Reagan or keep the Bush Crime Family from stealing the election in 2000.
The REAL REASON for that kind of stuff is to get the market share of conceited people who believe themselves to be enlightened while being, at the same time, insufficiently educated to keep themselves entertained by something other than themselves and their self regard. A relatively talentless performer like Bill Maher, George Carlin and Penn Jillette can rope in those suckers by feeding them on that. A truly smart and cynical performer will realize that's what they're doing but most of them aren't in on the biggest joke of their career. They're true believers as well.
Note: I've got no problem experimenting on those who are always asserting that science is the exclusive property of their ideology.
Also note, I've had a number of complaints that I've written so much about atheism. No one seems to be upset with the enormous presence atheist hate-talk has on the blogs and in the media. If PZ Myers, Greta Christina, Jerry Coyne, Penn Jillette, etc. can become famous by talking hate about more than 90% of the population that makes talking about the atheists entirely legitimate. I will make no apology in exploring the phenomenon and its adherents any more than I have in looking closely at Republican-fascists. I find that the two groups have a lot more in common than they'd like pointed out.
Last summer I noted the same about the consequences of being honest about the professional asshole, hate-talking thief of talented magician's material in order to destroy its intended value, and entirely unimportant self-promoting non-intellectual , definitely non-scientist, Penn Jillette. One is not to point out that Jillette is an asshole's asshole and that Teller is probably saved from exposing himself as the same only because his shtick is to keep his mouth shut.
The list of atheist idols one is not to diss on pain of being declared to have cooties includes the oneest of one-trick ponies Douglass Adams, the citation of whom is about as sure a sign of lazy slackerdom with pretensions of being intellectual as is currently available Really, aren't we all just waiting for the next incarnation of "Hitchhikers Guide" about as much as we are the inevitable "Oxygentank" tour of The Rolling Stones if Mick and at least one of his elderly Stones can breathe and hobble long enough? Adam's estate has been milking that property for many millions of times what it was ever worth.
The same is true in a smaller way for the estates of two other idols of atheist culture, Carl Sagan and the absolutely putrid neo-con and intellectual hooker, Christopher Hitchens. But they'll never reach the same stature as Lennon, Jillette and Adams. I suspect that another professional asshole of limited talent, Ricky Gervaise, will join the panthon of the Prometheus set. The formula is that you have to be an intellectually unchallenging, anti-religious hate talker who makes the unintellectual, hate talking atheist feel that they're superior to the vast majority of the population. Having a Brit accent is a big plus because the Brits produce an enormous number of the type and so many of the American atheists are rather shameless Anglophiles but it's not strictly required. At least not on this side of the Atlantic.
For the past few weeks I've been experimenting on blog atheists using another of the tediously over-cited gods of the godless, George Carlin. I remember his early stuff on TV, which was kind of funny. But he was never going to be a great comic on the strength of that. His beatnik themed act was pretty limited and he lacked the original genius and power of a Richard Pryor or Lilly Tomlin. As he got older and, I'd guess, increasingly desperate at the limits of his talent he started developing his anti-religious routine. He had enough experience and just enough intelligence to see the possibilities of getting hold of the same market share that Bill Maher has harvested after Carlin's death.
I heard Carlin doing it before I realized that he was getting more and more boring as he became preachier and nastier and appealed to a bunch of snobs based on their self-aggrandizing sterotypes of the vast majority of humanity. Cynicism doesn't have any power to change things - the original conceit of the Carlin style of humor - because it, frankly, despises most people. It can get the conceited to laugh at other people, which is far easier than even taking a pie in the pants but it is entirely useless to change anything.
Really, that is the supposed reason for that kind of alleged humor, that it is useful to defeat the fascists. And that reason is a demonstrable fraud. Looking back at the far, far more talented cabaret acts of the pre-Nazi period, really some of the most brilliant of performers and writers in the genre, it was less than useless in preventing the catastrophe that was so obviously coming. That's not an original idea, I've read other people who also noticed how that didn't work in the inter-war period. Nor will it ever because cynicism is an expression of the negation of values, which underlies fascism. You can't fight cynicism with cynicism. Trying that can only enhance cynicism, not anything else. The increasing cynicism of alleged comedy in the 1970s led to the past thirty years of conservative resurgence here. It undermined Jimmy Carter and did nothing to prevent Reagan or keep the Bush Crime Family from stealing the election in 2000.
The REAL REASON for that kind of stuff is to get the market share of conceited people who believe themselves to be enlightened while being, at the same time, insufficiently educated to keep themselves entertained by something other than themselves and their self regard. A relatively talentless performer like Bill Maher, George Carlin and Penn Jillette can rope in those suckers by feeding them on that. A truly smart and cynical performer will realize that's what they're doing but most of them aren't in on the biggest joke of their career. They're true believers as well.
Note: I've got no problem experimenting on those who are always asserting that science is the exclusive property of their ideology.
Also note, I've had a number of complaints that I've written so much about atheism. No one seems to be upset with the enormous presence atheist hate-talk has on the blogs and in the media. If PZ Myers, Greta Christina, Jerry Coyne, Penn Jillette, etc. can become famous by talking hate about more than 90% of the population that makes talking about the atheists entirely legitimate. I will make no apology in exploring the phenomenon and its adherents any more than I have in looking closely at Republican-fascists. I find that the two groups have a lot more in common than they'd like pointed out.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Saturday, January 26, 2013
On The Simell In the Inbox
The pop-hack who's aged and cranky,
Whose work is an overused hanky,
His vilification?
Just prevarication
His blog profile, boring and skanky
Update, An Explaination:
I'm still being trolled on other blogs I can't moderate by the former pop-music critic Steve Simels who is reduced to blogging since his pay job of writing about crap music is more suited to someone a third his age instead of someone trying to do what that oh, so important figure in culture, Dick Clark, did more credibly, extend adolescence into senescence. Only my personal troll is pretending to be kew-wel at the same time, a hipster in his own mind, someone eternally trying to pretend he's living Next Stop Greenwich Village but always closer to being one of the kids dancing on the floor on American Band Stand, trying to get into camera range to be discovered, than he is someone with his pretended intellectual and artistic significance. Only, when he realizes that at his age, that train left the platform about forty years ago and, so, he pretends that's not what he's so obviously still up to.
I, on the other hand, am just having a little fun with this blog war.
Atheism As A Hate Group The Left Shouldn't Depend On
A while back I began a blog called Not All Atheists Are Assholes (But This Blog Is About The Ones Who Are). Someone who happened to come across it during a google search told me about a post from last fall from Hemant, the owner of The Friendly Atheist blog*. The theme of it was
A Great Response to the Question ‘Why Do Atheists Seem Like Assholes?’
For anyone who frequents leftish blogs, who isn't an atheist the obvious answer is that so many atheists who one encounters while participating in liberal discussion ARE ASSHOLES. Though that's not the self-serving answer Hemant and Julia Sweeney give. I'll let you read that at the link above.
I've been spending a lot of time on Alternet this past month to see what's there to be seen, it's a mix of original content and an accumulator of other online stuff originating on other websites. One thing that's there to be seen and can't be missed is that it relies on the asshole atheist community to run up its hit count by providing them with atheist ditto-head fodder. Some of it checks out on fact checking, though a lot of it is ideologically slanted. Some of it is entirely false.
A lie told by atheists on an allegedly liberal website is as much a lie as one told by Rush 0r Glenn or Daddy Phelps. It is as much a lie as one told by Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin
Pointing out the inaccuracy of this food for hate is not welcome among these self-congratulating members of the "reality community". And, clearly, the people who run Alternet aren't much on fact checking when it's an opportunity to keep the athehaters on their site.
This has been my experience at Eschaton, Democratic Underground, Alternet, the Scienceblogs, a number of the Discover blogs, ... after a while you start to suspect there's a pattern there. If atheists want to have hate groups as their public face that's their decision. It will rub off on them. Those of us on the left who are not atheists have no reason, at all, to let a hate group to become associated with the left.
The New Atheists Are The Phelps Cult Inverted
* If you could sue someone for false labeling Hemant would be in hot water because his friendly blog is just another of the cooky cutter atheist hate talk blogs.
A Great Response to the Question ‘Why Do Atheists Seem Like Assholes?’
For anyone who frequents leftish blogs, who isn't an atheist the obvious answer is that so many atheists who one encounters while participating in liberal discussion ARE ASSHOLES. Though that's not the self-serving answer Hemant and Julia Sweeney give. I'll let you read that at the link above.
I've been spending a lot of time on Alternet this past month to see what's there to be seen, it's a mix of original content and an accumulator of other online stuff originating on other websites. One thing that's there to be seen and can't be missed is that it relies on the asshole atheist community to run up its hit count by providing them with atheist ditto-head fodder. Some of it checks out on fact checking, though a lot of it is ideologically slanted. Some of it is entirely false.
A lie told by atheists on an allegedly liberal website is as much a lie as one told by Rush 0r Glenn or Daddy Phelps. It is as much a lie as one told by Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin
Pointing out the inaccuracy of this food for hate is not welcome among these self-congratulating members of the "reality community". And, clearly, the people who run Alternet aren't much on fact checking when it's an opportunity to keep the athehaters on their site.
This has been my experience at Eschaton, Democratic Underground, Alternet, the Scienceblogs, a number of the Discover blogs, ... after a while you start to suspect there's a pattern there. If atheists want to have hate groups as their public face that's their decision. It will rub off on them. Those of us on the left who are not atheists have no reason, at all, to let a hate group to become associated with the left.
The New Atheists Are The Phelps Cult Inverted
* If you could sue someone for false labeling Hemant would be in hot water because his friendly blog is just another of the cooky cutter atheist hate talk blogs.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Being Told All About Being Gay By a Straight Man Probably Half My Age
Fossilized Liberals c. 1957 , from the period before second wave feminism. That's what I'm encountering among the self-defined liberals when discussing prostitution-porn (prostitution with voyeurism). All the same urban myths, all the same bromides and buzzwords, all the same weird assumptions of the virtuousness of what they fervently believe is their au courant, up to date sexy transgression Only, it's just the same old stuff that should have died off forty years ago. The fact is that, as Gloria Steinem said, the sexual revolution wasn't our war. "Our" means women, GLBT people, anyone who has had sex used as a means of their oppression.
Being gay, having been out before Stonewall (thank God I was born a musician), having seen it all from the anti-gay oppression of the 50s and the Mad Men era (there was no one who was more anti-gay than a "liberal" man of that period), the early days of gay liberation, which began BEFORE STONEWALL, the 1970s with its explosion in open gay sexuality and sex, when anal sex became the norm and was, in many circles, politically required, to the disaster of AIDS and the all too temporary use of science to inform sexual practice, to the "Aids is Over" idiocy and on to today when unprotected anal sex is not only on the rebound among gay men (with increased HIV positivity) but among straight men, many of whom seem to love the very real sense of domination that comes with it and women who go along with it, through coercion or the more subtle and effective coercion of being afraid of being called a prude or, in the case of the boys I'm arguing with "Schoolmarmish" (really, that word was used).
Now Mr. Liberal, "The_Dude404," is lecturing me about gay sex. Here's my last answer to him.
As a gay man who lived through the AIDS crisis, let me inform you, straight boy, anal sex is dangerous. That is a fact as scientifically supported as anything that comes out of the CDC. It used to be relatively rare among gay men I knew before the 1970s. Of the gay men I knew then, not a single one who didn't practice anal sex has become infected with HIV. Including myself. I'm unaware of the hepatitis status of that group but anal sex is also known as carrying an enhanced risk of that frequently fatal disease. I remember gay men in the early 1970s talking as if having hepatitis was a rite of passage. Having taken quite a bit of biology in college, knowing the link between hepatitis and liver disease, I was appalled and aware that things were headed for disaster. But the version of "sex pos" (so many of us never seem to have felt in the least "sex neg") that was current among gay men back then ran its course and many, many thousands have died from the results of sexually transmitted diseases that they'd never have caught if they'd either practiced frottage or they'd have been much less likely to have caught if they'd always used a condom and avoided transmission.
How 'bout you, straight boy? You going for some anal action without protection AS SO MANY PROSTITUTES ARE REQUIRED TO BY THE MEN WHO USE THEM AND THE PIMPS WHO BEAT THE HELL OUT OF THEM IF THEY REFUSE.
Being gay, having been out before Stonewall (thank God I was born a musician), having seen it all from the anti-gay oppression of the 50s and the Mad Men era (there was no one who was more anti-gay than a "liberal" man of that period), the early days of gay liberation, which began BEFORE STONEWALL, the 1970s with its explosion in open gay sexuality and sex, when anal sex became the norm and was, in many circles, politically required, to the disaster of AIDS and the all too temporary use of science to inform sexual practice, to the "Aids is Over" idiocy and on to today when unprotected anal sex is not only on the rebound among gay men (with increased HIV positivity) but among straight men, many of whom seem to love the very real sense of domination that comes with it and women who go along with it, through coercion or the more subtle and effective coercion of being afraid of being called a prude or, in the case of the boys I'm arguing with "Schoolmarmish" (really, that word was used).
Now Mr. Liberal, "The_Dude404," is lecturing me about gay sex. Here's my last answer to him.
As a gay man who lived through the AIDS crisis, let me inform you, straight boy, anal sex is dangerous. That is a fact as scientifically supported as anything that comes out of the CDC. It used to be relatively rare among gay men I knew before the 1970s. Of the gay men I knew then, not a single one who didn't practice anal sex has become infected with HIV. Including myself. I'm unaware of the hepatitis status of that group but anal sex is also known as carrying an enhanced risk of that frequently fatal disease. I remember gay men in the early 1970s talking as if having hepatitis was a rite of passage. Having taken quite a bit of biology in college, knowing the link between hepatitis and liver disease, I was appalled and aware that things were headed for disaster. But the version of "sex pos" (so many of us never seem to have felt in the least "sex neg") that was current among gay men back then ran its course and many, many thousands have died from the results of sexually transmitted diseases that they'd never have caught if they'd either practiced frottage or they'd have been much less likely to have caught if they'd always used a condom and avoided transmission.
How 'bout you, straight boy? You going for some anal action without protection AS SO MANY PROSTITUTES ARE REQUIRED TO BY THE MEN WHO USE THEM AND THE PIMPS WHO BEAT THE HELL OUT OF THEM IF THEY REFUSE.
A Comment
The Founding Fathers' dead hand is still impeding progress. They didn't intend for women, people of color, white men who weren't property owners to have any say in anything and their influence, their paranoid fear of a democratic government impeding their accumulation of wealth, especially through the extension of equality to those groups, has been one of the unmentioned things we've struggled against. American conservatism is based in that paranoid fear of egalitarian democracy, that is the most enduring legacy of the founding FATHERS.
That is why other countries can make progress and we can't.
On Being Mentioned In the Inaugural Speech
For something I didn't even imagine as possibly happening, President Obama's inclusion of the rights of gay people, including marriage equality is surprisingly meaningful for me.
It makes me feel good. It makes me glad to wake up to a country not ruled by Mitt Romney.
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