Several people around here have noted that this is the worst allergy season in memory and my allergies are many and severe, one of the blessings of living to get old. Or so I'm told. I will try to write something sufficiently startling and, perhaps, original to satisfy anyone who might come here for that, it's not that I'm not having ideas, it's that I'm too exhausted to write them out.
As to the tempest in a toss pot that my answer about the stupidity of the standardized spelling of the English language set off and, since the snobs will cow people into not adopting even the moderate and realistic original proposals that many have advocated, I have decided to, again, favor a return to non-standardized spelling.
Here is a footnote from Noah Webster's* interesting and, with some reservations, excellent 1789 An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation, proving that the original American genius, Benjamin Franklin had the same position I've adopted.
I once heard Dr. Franklin remark, "that those people spell best, who do not know how to spell," that is, they spell as their ears dictate, without being guided by rules, and thus fall into a regular orthography.
As I pointed out last weekend, Americans who sneer at spelling reform, using the standardized American spelling stupidly advocate what was presented, by Noah Webster as a spelling reform, himself noting the frequent stupidities to be found in the font of standardized Brit spelling, Samuel Johnson's mish mosh of a dictionary. I was surprised reading Webster's essay how much was known of how the defects of English spelling came into use, the fact that in the early days of printing most of the printers and typesetters were Dutch and introduced lots of the silent letters that vex so many writers of English, now. On top of that there was the late Renaissance - "Enlightenment" practice of snobs trying to introduce supposed Latin and Greek spelling into English words which, in many cases, were not derived from their supposed classical language false friends. Not to mention other sources for some of the worst problems. The idea that the written form of a language should be deformed out of any practical practice in the interest of alleged etymological erudition is about the stupidest idea ever to gain any kind of a foothold in any alleged intellectual establishment. That alone would justify We The People taking it back from the snobs and claiming our right to the written language.
But to hell with all that, if the snobs won't give up their petty skill - which, by the way, many of the forsworn enemies of spelling reform haven't really mastered, themselves - I advocate that the rest of us just follow Benjamin Franklin's words and spell however the hell we think best. Even the best sort of standard spellers have better manners and more wisdom than to despise someone who uses a different spelling, especially if they use the word according to its meaning.
------------------------------------
And, just to piss off those I'd find it most satisfying to like to piss off in my bad mood, the observation about the corruptions of English spelling introduced by the early print shops and publishers more or less render the arguments about the "hand D" manuscript of Thomas More being by the Stratford man, as put forward by the "Birthplace Trust" and the British Library, of entirely unknown but almost certainly vanishingly improbable import. There is no way to know how any variant spelling in a print source in the Tudor-Jacobean period came into being, how faithfully the print setter followed the hand written copy which, itself, could be a copy by someone not the author. Just thought I'd throw that in to annoy the trolls.
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
The Media Is The Mess
Stipulated: the Republican capacity to believe anything, encouraged by the modern conservative movement, and the conservative media's unmatched ability to monetize it, made someone like the current president* not only possible, but also inevitable. We can count ourselves marginally fortunate that the guy in the low-water golf pants is so bad at what he's trying to do. The main event in American conservatism over the next several years is going to be a monumental pissing match over the best strategy to consign these obvious truths to the same memory hole where they stashed the events of 2000-2008 and the detritus of the Avignon Presidency. And the first real brawl in this existential pie fight is going on right now.
Charles Pierce: These Conservative Intellectuals Can Go Hash Things Out on Some Desert Island While the Rest of Us Fix the Country
Everything he says about the absurdity of Trump giving Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom*, along with the likes of Milton Friedman to have been among the most fecund of advocates for economic disaster in modern times is true. I agree with everything he says. All well and good, Mr. Pierce, as far as it goes.
But it wasn't the intellectuals who caused the real problem, such scum taking office, it was the media gulling enough of "the rest of us" into putting Hollywood products and two Bushes, one Nixon and a bunch of the biggest bunch of goons as have ever held the Congress in place. The intellectuals found fertile ground in the composted brains of Reagan and Bush II and Trump - all I would bet having their most significant formation through Hollywood and other entertainment. That three out of the past five Republicans almost certainly had that formation (though Ford shouldn't count since he was the choice of Nixon, hot We The People) is certainly not irrelevant.
This is what a country formed by entertainment mass media is bound to turn into. The inevitability of that is as certain as that the past two Democrats have been afraid of the media and, so, have not been as aggressive as those who put them in office would have liked them to be.
I've mentioned before the early days of the Obama administration when cabloid TV was pushing the billionaire financed astro-turf campaign of the "Teaparty" that a blog commentator, I believe it was the erudite "Southern Beale" who pointed out that when CNN was giving full coverage of a sparsely attended "Teaparty Convention" in her town, there was a knitting convention happening in the same city which had many times more participants. And that was only one instance when the media, which Pierce is a full member of, did far more than an idiot pseudo-intellectual like Arthur Laffer did to destroy the country.
And the media is what led both Bill Clinton and, especially, Barack Obama into choosing to be weak presidents, discouraging their supporters, turning them into far weaker presidents than their support should have led to them being. Voluntary weakness in the face of media created backlash is the Democratic equivalent of Pierce's "prion disease" in the Republicans.
Until figures in the media own up to the part that the effectively unlimited freedom of the press to lie, to distort, to make disappear anyone they want to disappear from the day-to-day thinking of an effective margin of Voters, concentrating on the hijinks of the hirelings of billionaires who peddle horseshit like supply-side economics is far too little, too late.
Does anyone think that Donald Trump knew about Laffer except what he saw or heard about him on TV? On FOX? George W. Bush, no doubt inspired by his wife, pretended to read books. I don't think Trump even bothers to pretend that he reads, I don't think even his supporters believe he does. I don't think Milton Friedman would have gained any real traction in American politics if PBS hadn't had the billionaire financed series he did in the late 70s, in reaction to a series about the history of economics by Kenneth Galbraith earlier in the decade. No doubt some of Reagan's advisers saw it, I can't imagine it holding his dwindling attention for much more than part of an episode. Maybe Maureen interpreted it for him. From what I have heard, he mostly liked to watch his own movies and to talk about them. Trump, the formula to getting his attention is to mention him, even his own aids know that. And if it's too long, it doesn't work.
* I've always had an uneasy feeling about the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of president Kennedy's innovations. While some of the recipients of it have been, admittedly, great people, many have been the exact opposite. As time goes on I find that a lot of what happened in the Kennedy years has been of dubious wisdom or motive. I wish they'd stop giving the thing.
Charles Pierce: These Conservative Intellectuals Can Go Hash Things Out on Some Desert Island While the Rest of Us Fix the Country
Everything he says about the absurdity of Trump giving Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom*, along with the likes of Milton Friedman to have been among the most fecund of advocates for economic disaster in modern times is true. I agree with everything he says. All well and good, Mr. Pierce, as far as it goes.
But it wasn't the intellectuals who caused the real problem, such scum taking office, it was the media gulling enough of "the rest of us" into putting Hollywood products and two Bushes, one Nixon and a bunch of the biggest bunch of goons as have ever held the Congress in place. The intellectuals found fertile ground in the composted brains of Reagan and Bush II and Trump - all I would bet having their most significant formation through Hollywood and other entertainment. That three out of the past five Republicans almost certainly had that formation (though Ford shouldn't count since he was the choice of Nixon, hot We The People) is certainly not irrelevant.
This is what a country formed by entertainment mass media is bound to turn into. The inevitability of that is as certain as that the past two Democrats have been afraid of the media and, so, have not been as aggressive as those who put them in office would have liked them to be.
I've mentioned before the early days of the Obama administration when cabloid TV was pushing the billionaire financed astro-turf campaign of the "Teaparty" that a blog commentator, I believe it was the erudite "Southern Beale" who pointed out that when CNN was giving full coverage of a sparsely attended "Teaparty Convention" in her town, there was a knitting convention happening in the same city which had many times more participants. And that was only one instance when the media, which Pierce is a full member of, did far more than an idiot pseudo-intellectual like Arthur Laffer did to destroy the country.
And the media is what led both Bill Clinton and, especially, Barack Obama into choosing to be weak presidents, discouraging their supporters, turning them into far weaker presidents than their support should have led to them being. Voluntary weakness in the face of media created backlash is the Democratic equivalent of Pierce's "prion disease" in the Republicans.
Until figures in the media own up to the part that the effectively unlimited freedom of the press to lie, to distort, to make disappear anyone they want to disappear from the day-to-day thinking of an effective margin of Voters, concentrating on the hijinks of the hirelings of billionaires who peddle horseshit like supply-side economics is far too little, too late.
Does anyone think that Donald Trump knew about Laffer except what he saw or heard about him on TV? On FOX? George W. Bush, no doubt inspired by his wife, pretended to read books. I don't think Trump even bothers to pretend that he reads, I don't think even his supporters believe he does. I don't think Milton Friedman would have gained any real traction in American politics if PBS hadn't had the billionaire financed series he did in the late 70s, in reaction to a series about the history of economics by Kenneth Galbraith earlier in the decade. No doubt some of Reagan's advisers saw it, I can't imagine it holding his dwindling attention for much more than part of an episode. Maybe Maureen interpreted it for him. From what I have heard, he mostly liked to watch his own movies and to talk about them. Trump, the formula to getting his attention is to mention him, even his own aids know that. And if it's too long, it doesn't work.
* I've always had an uneasy feeling about the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of president Kennedy's innovations. While some of the recipients of it have been, admittedly, great people, many have been the exact opposite. As time goes on I find that a lot of what happened in the Kennedy years has been of dubious wisdom or motive. I wish they'd stop giving the thing.
Monday, June 3, 2019
Must See Boris Johnson Slamming Donald Trump Projected Onto Big Ben
Had a bad night and a rough morning and the putrid autumn olives are blooming sending my allergies into dangerous levels. And then there are the computer troubles.
I'll post later.
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Richard Rogers - Lover - Sonny Clark
Sonny Clark – piano
Jackie McLean – alto saxophone
Art Farmer – trumpet
Paul Chambers – bass
Philly Joe Jones – drums
Peggy Lee - Lover
What Rises To The Top When The Mush Of Situational Ethics and Utility Becomes More Generally Accepted
Considering this post dealing with Donald Trump's blatant denial that he had said things that he is either on video or audio or twitter as having said led me to think about how many times secularists, atheists, anti-Christians, have declared in a pose of ersatz scrupulosity (or, as a statement of sciency talk-show-guest-university- prof authorized "ethics") that morality is a product of "social consensus". I've been through that any number of times, pointing out to many an atheist that if that is the case then their mewling and whining that Pew and Gallup say that people say they don't want to vote for atheists is irrational because if that's the case then the "social consensus" as they define it, declares atheists are not to be voted for. You can extend that to any clearly depraved form of bigotry to any depth of violence. If it had been the "social consensus" among Nazis that Jews were to be murdered, by that "ethicist" holding, then the Holocaust could not be scientifically held to be wrong because it was the social consensus*. Adding on the add-on of the most muddle-headed form of that "utilitarianism" isn't much of a help in avoiding depravity.
The horror of so many of us that we are entering a depraved age when truth, itself, is becoming meaningless exposes the fact that every value we place on the truth is a function of absolute morality which, if that absolute morality is replaced by "situational ethics" or the kind of holding that morality is a product of mere "social consensus" then those finding themselves in an age where that moral value given to the truth is disbelieved or ignored or rejected by a majority or something arriving at the unanimity that such dolts never understand is required to produce a consensus, would have no ground to complain about the value of the truth being jettisoned by such a society.
* I wonder how such a "situational ethics" "consensus" based "ethics" would have worked to convince those whose murderous, genocidal conquests produced the Mongolian empire that there was something wrong with what they were doing in what may be the greatest example of genocidal violence in human history. It would certainly be useful to know more about the thinking of the Mongols than we seem to know, what effect their encounters with the Monotheistic religions and Buddhism had on them. Or if they would have conquered Europe if a climate fluctuation hadn't stopped them. If that's what did it.
We have no less of a potential to reproduce what they did and far worse with modern science and technology and organization and transportation. I wouldn't be surprised if in the near or far future modern mass murderers follow on from Hitler and Stalin and Mao to outdo the the Mongols of the late medieval era. The period of reemerging fascism we are in certainly makes that possibility more real instead of less.
I wonder how they can possibly find, never mind explain how anything was wrong about American apartheid in the South, the general disenfranchisement of Women up till the 1920s, etc. It was certainly not the general acceptance of such modern, sciency schemes that denied the existence of hard, durable and universal holdings of morality that led to that habitual way of thinking changing.
It is not those whose concept of morality is built on a foundation of mush who change things for the better, when those foundations of more people are based on mush, you get someone like Trump rising like a sheen of scum as it sinks below the surface.
The horror of so many of us that we are entering a depraved age when truth, itself, is becoming meaningless exposes the fact that every value we place on the truth is a function of absolute morality which, if that absolute morality is replaced by "situational ethics" or the kind of holding that morality is a product of mere "social consensus" then those finding themselves in an age where that moral value given to the truth is disbelieved or ignored or rejected by a majority or something arriving at the unanimity that such dolts never understand is required to produce a consensus, would have no ground to complain about the value of the truth being jettisoned by such a society.
* I wonder how such a "situational ethics" "consensus" based "ethics" would have worked to convince those whose murderous, genocidal conquests produced the Mongolian empire that there was something wrong with what they were doing in what may be the greatest example of genocidal violence in human history. It would certainly be useful to know more about the thinking of the Mongols than we seem to know, what effect their encounters with the Monotheistic religions and Buddhism had on them. Or if they would have conquered Europe if a climate fluctuation hadn't stopped them. If that's what did it.
We have no less of a potential to reproduce what they did and far worse with modern science and technology and organization and transportation. I wouldn't be surprised if in the near or far future modern mass murderers follow on from Hitler and Stalin and Mao to outdo the the Mongols of the late medieval era. The period of reemerging fascism we are in certainly makes that possibility more real instead of less.
I wonder how they can possibly find, never mind explain how anything was wrong about American apartheid in the South, the general disenfranchisement of Women up till the 1920s, etc. It was certainly not the general acceptance of such modern, sciency schemes that denied the existence of hard, durable and universal holdings of morality that led to that habitual way of thinking changing.
It is not those whose concept of morality is built on a foundation of mush who change things for the better, when those foundations of more people are based on mush, you get someone like Trump rising like a sheen of scum as it sinks below the surface.
Saturday, June 1, 2019
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Martin Jameson - DCI Stone - Something To Do
When a young boy is discovered badly injured and left for dead, DCI Stone is shocked and disturbed by what the investigation uncovers. The truth proves elusive and Stone must delve deep into the motives behind this brutal crime and face some uncomfortable questions about the nature of criminal responsibility.
Again this week, I'm pressed for time so I don't have the time to look up the full credits and won't post a partial list.
DCI Stone is a superior cop-opera, the voice acting is excellent and the use of sound effects is very good, too. Not to mention the writing.
Run This Through Your Spell Check American Or Brit Spelling
Sir,
Your letter of the 3d has been duly recieved. that of mr Eppes had before come to hand, covering your MS. on the reformation of the orthography of the plurals of nouns ending in y, and ey, and on orthoepy. a change has been long desired in English orthography, such as might render it an easy and true index of the pronuntiation of words. the want of conformity between the combinations of letters, and the sounds they should represent increases to foreigners the difficulty of acquiring the language, occasions great loss of time to children in learning to read, and renders correct spelling rare but in those who read much. in England a variety of plans & propositions have been made for the reformation of their orthography. passing over these two of our countrymen, Dr Franklin and Doctr Thornton have also engaged in the enterprize; the former proposing an addition of two or three new characters only, the latter a reformation of the whole alphabet nearly. but these attempts in England, as well as here, have been without effect. about the middle of the last century an attempt was made to banish the letter d, from the words bridge, judge, hedge, knowledge, Et others of that termination, & to write them as we write age, cage, sacrilege privilege; but with little success. the attempt also was made, which you mention in your 2d part to drop the letter u in words of Latin derivation ending in our, and to write honor, candor, rigor Etc instead of honour, candour rigour. but the u having been picked up in the passage of these words from the Latin, thro’ the French, to us, is still preserved by those who consider it as a memorial of our title to the words. other partial attempts have been made by individual writers, but with as little success. pluralising nouns in y, & ey by adding s only, as you propose would certainly simplify the spelling, and be analogous to the general idiom of the language. it would be a step gained in the progress of general reformation, if it could prevail.1 but my opinion being requested, I must give it candidly, that, judging of the future by the past, I expect no better fortune to this than similar preceding propositions have experienced. it is very difficult to persuade the great body of mankind to give up what they have once learned, & are now masters of, for something to be learnt anew. time alone insensibly wears down old habits, and produces small changes at long intervals; and to this process we must all accomodate ourselves, and be content to follow those who will not follow us. our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had 20. ways of spelling the word ‘many.’ ten centuries have dropped all of them and substituted that which we now use.
I now return your MS. without being able, with the gentlemen whose letters are cited to encourage hope as to it’s effect. I am bound however to acknolege that this is a subject to which I have not paid much attention; and that my doubts therefore should weigh nothing against their more favorable expectations. that these may be fulfilled, and mine prove unfounded, I sincerely wish, because I am a friend to the reformation generally of whatever can be made better; and because it could not fail of gratifying you to be instrumental in this work. Accept the assurance of my respects.
Th: Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson to John Wilson, 17 August 1813
" my doubts therefore should weigh nothing against their more favorable expectations" Hey, if Thomas Jefferson, certainly one of the smartest men of his time said that, I'm certainly not going to be discouraged by the mockery of a post-literate simp.
I will point out that Jefferson contradicted himself in an important way between this clearly true statement that runs all through those who have thought about the issue:
the want of conformity between the combinations of letters, and the sounds they should represent increases to foreigners the difficulty of acquiring the language, occasions great loss of time to children in learning to read, and renders correct spelling rare but in those who read much
and this:
it is very difficult to persuade the great body of mankind to give up what they have once learned, & are now masters of, for something to be learnt anew.
Apart from Jefferson's own irregular spelling in this very letter (and throughout his writing) such things as his irregular capitalization of letters, etc. it is clear that other of "those who read much" don't have all that much more success in mastering standardized English spelling. I'm convinced that a good majority of those who rail against, mock and resist spelling reform have all be poseurs who, if their own writing was looked into, aren't the masters of it they like to pretend they are. I think they're more like the grammar police who real grammarians know are mostly frauds. Look in my archive for "Strunk" and "White" for currently deified examples of that.
Your letter of the 3d has been duly recieved. that of mr Eppes had before come to hand, covering your MS. on the reformation of the orthography of the plurals of nouns ending in y, and ey, and on orthoepy. a change has been long desired in English orthography, such as might render it an easy and true index of the pronuntiation of words. the want of conformity between the combinations of letters, and the sounds they should represent increases to foreigners the difficulty of acquiring the language, occasions great loss of time to children in learning to read, and renders correct spelling rare but in those who read much. in England a variety of plans & propositions have been made for the reformation of their orthography. passing over these two of our countrymen, Dr Franklin and Doctr Thornton have also engaged in the enterprize; the former proposing an addition of two or three new characters only, the latter a reformation of the whole alphabet nearly. but these attempts in England, as well as here, have been without effect. about the middle of the last century an attempt was made to banish the letter d, from the words bridge, judge, hedge, knowledge, Et others of that termination, & to write them as we write age, cage, sacrilege privilege; but with little success. the attempt also was made, which you mention in your 2d part to drop the letter u in words of Latin derivation ending in our, and to write honor, candor, rigor Etc instead of honour, candour rigour. but the u having been picked up in the passage of these words from the Latin, thro’ the French, to us, is still preserved by those who consider it as a memorial of our title to the words. other partial attempts have been made by individual writers, but with as little success. pluralising nouns in y, & ey by adding s only, as you propose would certainly simplify the spelling, and be analogous to the general idiom of the language. it would be a step gained in the progress of general reformation, if it could prevail.1 but my opinion being requested, I must give it candidly, that, judging of the future by the past, I expect no better fortune to this than similar preceding propositions have experienced. it is very difficult to persuade the great body of mankind to give up what they have once learned, & are now masters of, for something to be learnt anew. time alone insensibly wears down old habits, and produces small changes at long intervals; and to this process we must all accomodate ourselves, and be content to follow those who will not follow us. our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had 20. ways of spelling the word ‘many.’ ten centuries have dropped all of them and substituted that which we now use.
I now return your MS. without being able, with the gentlemen whose letters are cited to encourage hope as to it’s effect. I am bound however to acknolege that this is a subject to which I have not paid much attention; and that my doubts therefore should weigh nothing against their more favorable expectations. that these may be fulfilled, and mine prove unfounded, I sincerely wish, because I am a friend to the reformation generally of whatever can be made better; and because it could not fail of gratifying you to be instrumental in this work. Accept the assurance of my respects.
Th: Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson to John Wilson, 17 August 1813
" my doubts therefore should weigh nothing against their more favorable expectations" Hey, if Thomas Jefferson, certainly one of the smartest men of his time said that, I'm certainly not going to be discouraged by the mockery of a post-literate simp.
I will point out that Jefferson contradicted himself in an important way between this clearly true statement that runs all through those who have thought about the issue:
the want of conformity between the combinations of letters, and the sounds they should represent increases to foreigners the difficulty of acquiring the language, occasions great loss of time to children in learning to read, and renders correct spelling rare but in those who read much
and this:
it is very difficult to persuade the great body of mankind to give up what they have once learned, & are now masters of, for something to be learnt anew.
Apart from Jefferson's own irregular spelling in this very letter (and throughout his writing) such things as his irregular capitalization of letters, etc. it is clear that other of "those who read much" don't have all that much more success in mastering standardized English spelling. I'm convinced that a good majority of those who rail against, mock and resist spelling reform have all be poseurs who, if their own writing was looked into, aren't the masters of it they like to pretend they are. I think they're more like the grammar police who real grammarians know are mostly frauds. Look in my archive for "Strunk" and "White" for currently deified examples of that.
Hate Mail - Not The Most Important Thing But A Bit Of Fun
I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.
Mark Twain: Autobiography
As to those who do not spell well, if the two difficulties are compared, [viz.] that of teaching them true spelling in the present mode, and that of teaching them the new alphabet and the new spelling according to it; I am confident that the latter would be by far the least. They naturally fall into the new method already, as much as the imperfection of their alphabet will admit of; Their present bad spelling is only bad, because contrary to the present bad rules; under the new rules it would be good. The difficulty of learning to spell well in the old way is so great, that few attain it; thousands and thousands writing on to old age, without ever being able to acquire it. ’Tis, besides, a difficulty continually increasing; as the sound gradually varies more and more from the spelling: and to foreigners it makes the learning to pronounce our language, as written in our books, almost impossible.
Benjamin Franklin: Letter to Mary Stevenson, 28 September 1768
It is the generations of children to come who appeal to us to save them from the affliction which we have endured and forgotten.
William Dwight Whitney
The only reason I ever wrote about the absurdity of standardized English spelling was because of what I wrote about here the other day, that it discourages people from writing their ideas down where they can see them, notice where their thinking isn't clear or doesn't make sense or conflicts with their better parts and aspirations and to improve their thinking. Thinking more morally, more clearly has to come before acting better.
That and the fact that stupid people with a rather minor skill of visual memory like to lord their adherence to standardized English spelling over the majority of English speakers as if it were a sign of superiority, whereas a really superior person with such a skill wouldn't use it in such a base and stupid way. The troll who tries to volunteer as the tireless little meter maid of my spelling (who, by the way, I have caught in some of those, myself) is a particularly stupid and base specimen of that type of snob.
Anything that prevents anyone who speaks English from using it in all its forms, for speaking, thinking, reading or writing promotes a social and, inevitably, economic caste system. I think the most muddled thinkers of normal intelligence are capable of far clearer thinking than such snobs dearly love to believe they are capable of. If ten or five percent of people who have been discouraged by being "bad spellers" from writing and re-reading what they wrote and improving the clarity and moral content of their thinking through that review started writing and reading what they wrote, I think the political character of the United States could improve enormously.
That an American who delights in his minor skill of spelling according to the American standard rules uses those to mock any idea of spelling reform is especially stupid and only proves his ignorance BECAUSE NOAH WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY IS, ITSELF, AN INTENTIONAL REFORM OF THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
Noah Webster was struck by the inconsistencies of English spelling and the obstacles it presented to learners (young and old alike) and resented that American classrooms were filled only with British textbooks. The spelling reform featured in his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, was based on the author's combined vision of logic and aesthetics. He changed the –ce in words like defence, offence, and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent "l" in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the "u" from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the "k" from words such as publick and musick. The "publick" readily accepted many of these changes and just as readily rejected some of the others.
Or, as he, himself wrote:
The simplicity of the orthography would facilitate the learning of the language. It is now the work of years for children to learn to spell; and after all, the business is rarely accomplished …
But with the proposed orthography, a child would learn to spell, without trouble, in a very short time, and the orthography being very regular, he would ever afterwards find it difficult to make a mistake. It would, in that case, be as difficult to spell wrong as it is now to spell right.
As someone capable of reading can see from that, his goals were similar to mine, the democratization of the written language.
A correct orthography would render the pronunciation of the language, as uniform as the spelling in books. A general uniformity thro the United States, would be the event of such a reformation as I am here recommending. All persons, of every rank, would speak with some degree of precision and uniformity. Such uniformity in these states is very desirable; it would remove prejudice, and conciliate mutual affection and respect.
Though, as experience has proved, his successful reform has not gotten the job nearly done because, as he, himself noted, the irrationalities and irregularities of English spelling are so many. I honor Webster's democratizing intentions far better than the snobs who use HIS standardized spelling as a venue of snobbery and class divide. I'd rather be on the side of all of those people named above than a person so bereft of intellectual content that he has to inconsistently go on about it like he does.
And, as you can see from that excerpted essay linked to, one of Webster's main objectives was to separate the American language from the British language, something which those at the Oxford Dictionary use rather mockingly in their own brand of Simpian snobbery:
Have you ever wondered why Americans use the spellings honor, neighbor, valor, while the British use honour, neighbour, valour? Has a computer spellchecker or human copy-editor ever stopped your wingèd prose as it travelled (traveled) up through the clouds of Parnassus and subjected it to a tedious extra round of labour (labor), changing cheque to check, theatre to theater, and gaol to jail (or the other way around)?
You can lay the blame for this offence (offense) on Noah Webster, an American lexicologist of the 18th and 19th centuries who wrote and published the first American dictionary. Webster advocated far-reaching reforms in written American English, saying: ‘Let us then seize the present moment, and establish a national language, as well as a national government.’ Not all of his dreams for American English took hold, but enough of them did to make the first rip in a tradition that eventually tore apart – to become, in the quip of George Bernard Shaw, ‘two nations divided by a common language.’
. . . Today, linguists have amassed piles of evidence to show that the idea of reforming spelling in the English language by connecting letters absolutely to phonemes is silly and unworkable. Even in Webster’s time, many onlookers considered spelling reform to be ridiculous. Most efforts to implement it didn’t work, even when powerful institutions were involved. (For instance, in New York, Governor Theodore Roosevelt asked the state government to adopt in official documents a system of reformed spelling that an institution called the Simplified Spelling Board had developed; public ridicule soon made him abandon the plan.) Still, the hard work and dedication of one lone crank in Connecticut managed to have a lasting effect on the writing of a nation. It’s enough to give hope to all of us with an opinion about language and a dream. (Here’s mine: I think the word carillon should be pronounced carry-on.) And life without dreams would truly be a matter for greef.
perhaps that mockery is motivated, in part, because, as Webster pointed out, among the advantages of the United States having a different spelling, it would lead to the creation of a publishing and printing industry in the United States using his reformed spelling because, as he wisely noted, the Brits would never adopt American spelling. Oxford doesn't like the competition.
From that you can also see that Webster, himself, realized only a partial reform to a more democratic form of written language that was possible in his reform of English spelling in his time. Though it seems to be news to those at Oxford, Webster's partial success proves that it is possible to gradually reform spelling. The largest obstacle of that, the snobs, the champions of traditionalist snobbery, the poseurs who pretend to that because they want to be mistaken as learned, etc. will give way to the return of unstandardized spelling, intentional or unintended. I'm in favor of that.
So, mock on in your ignorance, oh, Great Speller, I couldn't care less what you say on the subject.
Note: I have given Thorstein Veblen's wonderfully dry mockery of the standard spelling of English before but it's so good I'll give it again.
As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
Mark Twain: Autobiography
As to those who do not spell well, if the two difficulties are compared, [viz.] that of teaching them true spelling in the present mode, and that of teaching them the new alphabet and the new spelling according to it; I am confident that the latter would be by far the least. They naturally fall into the new method already, as much as the imperfection of their alphabet will admit of; Their present bad spelling is only bad, because contrary to the present bad rules; under the new rules it would be good. The difficulty of learning to spell well in the old way is so great, that few attain it; thousands and thousands writing on to old age, without ever being able to acquire it. ’Tis, besides, a difficulty continually increasing; as the sound gradually varies more and more from the spelling: and to foreigners it makes the learning to pronounce our language, as written in our books, almost impossible.
Benjamin Franklin: Letter to Mary Stevenson, 28 September 1768
It is the generations of children to come who appeal to us to save them from the affliction which we have endured and forgotten.
William Dwight Whitney
The only reason I ever wrote about the absurdity of standardized English spelling was because of what I wrote about here the other day, that it discourages people from writing their ideas down where they can see them, notice where their thinking isn't clear or doesn't make sense or conflicts with their better parts and aspirations and to improve their thinking. Thinking more morally, more clearly has to come before acting better.
That and the fact that stupid people with a rather minor skill of visual memory like to lord their adherence to standardized English spelling over the majority of English speakers as if it were a sign of superiority, whereas a really superior person with such a skill wouldn't use it in such a base and stupid way. The troll who tries to volunteer as the tireless little meter maid of my spelling (who, by the way, I have caught in some of those, myself) is a particularly stupid and base specimen of that type of snob.
Anything that prevents anyone who speaks English from using it in all its forms, for speaking, thinking, reading or writing promotes a social and, inevitably, economic caste system. I think the most muddled thinkers of normal intelligence are capable of far clearer thinking than such snobs dearly love to believe they are capable of. If ten or five percent of people who have been discouraged by being "bad spellers" from writing and re-reading what they wrote and improving the clarity and moral content of their thinking through that review started writing and reading what they wrote, I think the political character of the United States could improve enormously.
That an American who delights in his minor skill of spelling according to the American standard rules uses those to mock any idea of spelling reform is especially stupid and only proves his ignorance BECAUSE NOAH WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY IS, ITSELF, AN INTENTIONAL REFORM OF THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
Noah Webster was struck by the inconsistencies of English spelling and the obstacles it presented to learners (young and old alike) and resented that American classrooms were filled only with British textbooks. The spelling reform featured in his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, was based on the author's combined vision of logic and aesthetics. He changed the –ce in words like defence, offence, and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent "l" in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the "u" from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the "k" from words such as publick and musick. The "publick" readily accepted many of these changes and just as readily rejected some of the others.
Or, as he, himself wrote:
The simplicity of the orthography would facilitate the learning of the language. It is now the work of years for children to learn to spell; and after all, the business is rarely accomplished …
But with the proposed orthography, a child would learn to spell, without trouble, in a very short time, and the orthography being very regular, he would ever afterwards find it difficult to make a mistake. It would, in that case, be as difficult to spell wrong as it is now to spell right.
As someone capable of reading can see from that, his goals were similar to mine, the democratization of the written language.
A correct orthography would render the pronunciation of the language, as uniform as the spelling in books. A general uniformity thro the United States, would be the event of such a reformation as I am here recommending. All persons, of every rank, would speak with some degree of precision and uniformity. Such uniformity in these states is very desirable; it would remove prejudice, and conciliate mutual affection and respect.
Though, as experience has proved, his successful reform has not gotten the job nearly done because, as he, himself noted, the irrationalities and irregularities of English spelling are so many. I honor Webster's democratizing intentions far better than the snobs who use HIS standardized spelling as a venue of snobbery and class divide. I'd rather be on the side of all of those people named above than a person so bereft of intellectual content that he has to inconsistently go on about it like he does.
And, as you can see from that excerpted essay linked to, one of Webster's main objectives was to separate the American language from the British language, something which those at the Oxford Dictionary use rather mockingly in their own brand of Simpian snobbery:
Have you ever wondered why Americans use the spellings honor, neighbor, valor, while the British use honour, neighbour, valour? Has a computer spellchecker or human copy-editor ever stopped your wingèd prose as it travelled (traveled) up through the clouds of Parnassus and subjected it to a tedious extra round of labour (labor), changing cheque to check, theatre to theater, and gaol to jail (or the other way around)?
You can lay the blame for this offence (offense) on Noah Webster, an American lexicologist of the 18th and 19th centuries who wrote and published the first American dictionary. Webster advocated far-reaching reforms in written American English, saying: ‘Let us then seize the present moment, and establish a national language, as well as a national government.’ Not all of his dreams for American English took hold, but enough of them did to make the first rip in a tradition that eventually tore apart – to become, in the quip of George Bernard Shaw, ‘two nations divided by a common language.’
. . . Today, linguists have amassed piles of evidence to show that the idea of reforming spelling in the English language by connecting letters absolutely to phonemes is silly and unworkable. Even in Webster’s time, many onlookers considered spelling reform to be ridiculous. Most efforts to implement it didn’t work, even when powerful institutions were involved. (For instance, in New York, Governor Theodore Roosevelt asked the state government to adopt in official documents a system of reformed spelling that an institution called the Simplified Spelling Board had developed; public ridicule soon made him abandon the plan.) Still, the hard work and dedication of one lone crank in Connecticut managed to have a lasting effect on the writing of a nation. It’s enough to give hope to all of us with an opinion about language and a dream. (Here’s mine: I think the word carillon should be pronounced carry-on.) And life without dreams would truly be a matter for greef.
perhaps that mockery is motivated, in part, because, as Webster pointed out, among the advantages of the United States having a different spelling, it would lead to the creation of a publishing and printing industry in the United States using his reformed spelling because, as he wisely noted, the Brits would never adopt American spelling. Oxford doesn't like the competition.
From that you can also see that Webster, himself, realized only a partial reform to a more democratic form of written language that was possible in his reform of English spelling in his time. Though it seems to be news to those at Oxford, Webster's partial success proves that it is possible to gradually reform spelling. The largest obstacle of that, the snobs, the champions of traditionalist snobbery, the poseurs who pretend to that because they want to be mistaken as learned, etc. will give way to the return of unstandardized spelling, intentional or unintended. I'm in favor of that.
So, mock on in your ignorance, oh, Great Speller, I couldn't care less what you say on the subject.
Note: I have given Thorstein Veblen's wonderfully dry mockery of the standard spelling of English before but it's so good I'll give it again.
As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
Friday, May 31, 2019
Putin Has Only Taken Advantage Of Weaknesses Americans Chose To Inflict On Ourselves
If you go through the exercise of thinking one of the biggest issues facing the United States today, the "hacking" of our elections to its origins, its roots, and what it will mean to really, truly end the danger to democracy here and elsewhere, it exposes exactly those problems with the media lying, distorting and propagandizing We The People on the one hand and ignoring what they wanted to make disappear from consciousness on the other hand.
What I've been campaigning against with increasing effort since witnessing the election of Nixon in 1968. If you haven't thought it through to the bottom yet, don't feel that bad, it took me decades to cut through the pious slogans learned in my early adulthood to see reality, too. And to do it you have to be willing to critique some of the piously and scrupulously held substitutes for morality that I am coming to believe are an inherent danger of secularism.*
We now know that the Putin regime used social media to ratfuck the 2016 election to put Donald Trump in the presidency and, I wouldn't be surprised, Republican-fascists in the Congress. We know that such efforts continued into the 2018 election.
As even the mentally deficient son-in-law Jared Kushner has admitted, one of the ways they did that was through using Facebook, to spread propaganda and influence people targeted with the use of Facebook's ad-selling data collection as being especially vulnerable. And they also did that in concert with Wikileaks and RT and other media venues.
I've heard hours and hours of chatter in the media and read countless articles on this but none of them seem to understand that what Putin did was exactly the same thing that Republicans have been doing since Richard Viguerie pioneered the use of demographics and other means of targeting people with mass mailings on behalf of the kind of Republicans who morphed into Trumpian fascists. And he was copying the methods pioneered by the advertising agency and its off-shoot, the American broadcast and cabloid media. They have all done that, THE AMERICAN MEDIA, CORPORATE MEDIA HAS BEEN RATFUCKING OUR ELECTIONS WITH MODERN METHODS FAR LONGER THAN PUTIN HAS.
That ability to do that was expanded enormously as the American media first was relieved of any real expectation of having to face a lawsuit if they lied about liberals by the "liberal" Warren Court in 1964 - I believe the pivotal event in getting us where we are today - through subsequent court rulings dealing with "free speech - free press" and through the opportunities that such rulings gave those who wanted to sway government to enrich them through buying media time, through pressuring network executives and station owners (as if they had to be pressured very hard) into promoting their interests, socially and politically, and with effectively unregulated cable and hate talk radio, things started going farther to hell at an ever increasing rate. Adding in computers to make the paperwork and distribution easier and cheaper and faster only made things go to hell faster.
The social-media that was ratfucked by a foreign despot to give us Trump was just the next step in a process of destroying democracy that began right here, through the "free-speech-free-press" piety of the mid-20th century.
As an aside, it is remarkable how many people have that as their one and only sacred thing, how people who are as profane as the most degenerate pervert, the most "nothing sacred" irreligious, mocker, the most ironically cynical hater of humanity and anti-democrat, the most libertine and libertarian, most nihilistic of nihilists will, despite all that, hold as sacred the shibboleths of "free speech - free press" and piously defend it against any critical assessment of it as an absolute holding of the law. That so many of them are in the media, in the writing for money racket, what passes as "art" in this time when "art" is so often indistinguishable from any other salable commodity is certainly no coincidence.
Even if every foreign despot, every foreigner of any kind were prevented from perverting out election through selling lies, those who want to do so while holding U.S. citizenship would still destroy our country. The Supreme Court members who adopted the Sullivan Decision, Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. were all Americans, all of them sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, all of them pious intoners of the words of the Constitution, twisting them as served their purposes. The rightly despised twisting of the Constitutional system by Mitch McConnell is not really any different than anyone else twisting it to malignant purposes. But he didn't get to where he is without people being sold lies through the media, through the movies and TV shows, entertainment far more effective for that purpose than the "news," through campaign ads, the diseased transfusion that has infected our democracy more directly than anything else. PUTIN'S FAKE POLITICAL ADS PRETENDING TO COME FROM AMERICANS IS JUST HIM TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THAT AVENUE OF INFECTION THAT THE "CIVIL LIBERTIES" LANGUAGE OF 20TH CENTURY LIBERALS** OPENED UP WHEN IT PREVENTED PEOPLE LIED ABOUT FROM SUING THE AMERICAN MEDIA.
* Don't feel so bad, there are, yes, inherent dangers in religiosity as well. Those are not only fully exposed, they are so habitually thought of in the West that we habitually invent nonexistent ones to add to that list.
The naive faith of the 18th century "enlightenment" that secularism was going to remove all such inherent dangers scientifically, logically, turns out to have been as stupid as believing that a culture of religiosity was going to be immune from generating such dangers due to the inherent limitations of human wisdom, knowledge, good-will, individually and collectively. Oddly enough, the source that I find where such critiques are most exigently made is in nothing less than the Jewish scriptures, written by so many inspired critics and witnesses to the disastrous history of the Hebrews as they lived out just about every definable variation in human folly, religious, political, social, individual, through corrupt religious and civil officials and priests. We gave up a huge resource when
a. the enlightenment rejected it,
b. the enlightenment, also, read those scriptures without understanding the purposes of their composition,
c. the folly of literal interpretation, mistaking them, anachronistically, as being readable as modern history or science are. It is one of the supreme ironies of organized Fundamentalism that their quite unbliblical modern habits of thought were imposed on writings that were never intended to be read that way.
The American "founders" the ones who wrote the Constitution, believing that 18th century science and mathematics had the possibility of rendering people immune from some of the more obvious vicissitudes of being human beings in bloody human history were just as stupid as those who thought that piously belonging to this or that Church made them immune. Believe me, I remember enough of neo-medieval 1950s Catholicism to understand it when I see it.
** I have to point out, again, that the central figure of that "free speech" language, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. being mistaken as a "liberal" due to that proves what a bunch of dishonest, ignorant, fools the semi-pro and professionals of the "free speech" industry are and what a bunch of total chumps so many even real liberals have been for being suckered by that crap. Holmes was a cynical, degenerate, aristocratic hater of humanity and democracy with a real malevolent streak in him. His late usefulness to FDR in the very last years of his life is something I've come to see as the cynical old asshole hedging his bets in case he was wrong about an afterlife with consequences when he was too old to enjoy the fruits of his degeneracy. I really have to say, the more I've come to know about Holmes the worse it's obvious that he was.
What I've been campaigning against with increasing effort since witnessing the election of Nixon in 1968. If you haven't thought it through to the bottom yet, don't feel that bad, it took me decades to cut through the pious slogans learned in my early adulthood to see reality, too. And to do it you have to be willing to critique some of the piously and scrupulously held substitutes for morality that I am coming to believe are an inherent danger of secularism.*
We now know that the Putin regime used social media to ratfuck the 2016 election to put Donald Trump in the presidency and, I wouldn't be surprised, Republican-fascists in the Congress. We know that such efforts continued into the 2018 election.
As even the mentally deficient son-in-law Jared Kushner has admitted, one of the ways they did that was through using Facebook, to spread propaganda and influence people targeted with the use of Facebook's ad-selling data collection as being especially vulnerable. And they also did that in concert with Wikileaks and RT and other media venues.
I've heard hours and hours of chatter in the media and read countless articles on this but none of them seem to understand that what Putin did was exactly the same thing that Republicans have been doing since Richard Viguerie pioneered the use of demographics and other means of targeting people with mass mailings on behalf of the kind of Republicans who morphed into Trumpian fascists. And he was copying the methods pioneered by the advertising agency and its off-shoot, the American broadcast and cabloid media. They have all done that, THE AMERICAN MEDIA, CORPORATE MEDIA HAS BEEN RATFUCKING OUR ELECTIONS WITH MODERN METHODS FAR LONGER THAN PUTIN HAS.
That ability to do that was expanded enormously as the American media first was relieved of any real expectation of having to face a lawsuit if they lied about liberals by the "liberal" Warren Court in 1964 - I believe the pivotal event in getting us where we are today - through subsequent court rulings dealing with "free speech - free press" and through the opportunities that such rulings gave those who wanted to sway government to enrich them through buying media time, through pressuring network executives and station owners (as if they had to be pressured very hard) into promoting their interests, socially and politically, and with effectively unregulated cable and hate talk radio, things started going farther to hell at an ever increasing rate. Adding in computers to make the paperwork and distribution easier and cheaper and faster only made things go to hell faster.
The social-media that was ratfucked by a foreign despot to give us Trump was just the next step in a process of destroying democracy that began right here, through the "free-speech-free-press" piety of the mid-20th century.
As an aside, it is remarkable how many people have that as their one and only sacred thing, how people who are as profane as the most degenerate pervert, the most "nothing sacred" irreligious, mocker, the most ironically cynical hater of humanity and anti-democrat, the most libertine and libertarian, most nihilistic of nihilists will, despite all that, hold as sacred the shibboleths of "free speech - free press" and piously defend it against any critical assessment of it as an absolute holding of the law. That so many of them are in the media, in the writing for money racket, what passes as "art" in this time when "art" is so often indistinguishable from any other salable commodity is certainly no coincidence.
Even if every foreign despot, every foreigner of any kind were prevented from perverting out election through selling lies, those who want to do so while holding U.S. citizenship would still destroy our country. The Supreme Court members who adopted the Sullivan Decision, Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. were all Americans, all of them sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, all of them pious intoners of the words of the Constitution, twisting them as served their purposes. The rightly despised twisting of the Constitutional system by Mitch McConnell is not really any different than anyone else twisting it to malignant purposes. But he didn't get to where he is without people being sold lies through the media, through the movies and TV shows, entertainment far more effective for that purpose than the "news," through campaign ads, the diseased transfusion that has infected our democracy more directly than anything else. PUTIN'S FAKE POLITICAL ADS PRETENDING TO COME FROM AMERICANS IS JUST HIM TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THAT AVENUE OF INFECTION THAT THE "CIVIL LIBERTIES" LANGUAGE OF 20TH CENTURY LIBERALS** OPENED UP WHEN IT PREVENTED PEOPLE LIED ABOUT FROM SUING THE AMERICAN MEDIA.
* Don't feel so bad, there are, yes, inherent dangers in religiosity as well. Those are not only fully exposed, they are so habitually thought of in the West that we habitually invent nonexistent ones to add to that list.
The naive faith of the 18th century "enlightenment" that secularism was going to remove all such inherent dangers scientifically, logically, turns out to have been as stupid as believing that a culture of religiosity was going to be immune from generating such dangers due to the inherent limitations of human wisdom, knowledge, good-will, individually and collectively. Oddly enough, the source that I find where such critiques are most exigently made is in nothing less than the Jewish scriptures, written by so many inspired critics and witnesses to the disastrous history of the Hebrews as they lived out just about every definable variation in human folly, religious, political, social, individual, through corrupt religious and civil officials and priests. We gave up a huge resource when
a. the enlightenment rejected it,
b. the enlightenment, also, read those scriptures without understanding the purposes of their composition,
c. the folly of literal interpretation, mistaking them, anachronistically, as being readable as modern history or science are. It is one of the supreme ironies of organized Fundamentalism that their quite unbliblical modern habits of thought were imposed on writings that were never intended to be read that way.
The American "founders" the ones who wrote the Constitution, believing that 18th century science and mathematics had the possibility of rendering people immune from some of the more obvious vicissitudes of being human beings in bloody human history were just as stupid as those who thought that piously belonging to this or that Church made them immune. Believe me, I remember enough of neo-medieval 1950s Catholicism to understand it when I see it.
** I have to point out, again, that the central figure of that "free speech" language, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. being mistaken as a "liberal" due to that proves what a bunch of dishonest, ignorant, fools the semi-pro and professionals of the "free speech" industry are and what a bunch of total chumps so many even real liberals have been for being suckered by that crap. Holmes was a cynical, degenerate, aristocratic hater of humanity and democracy with a real malevolent streak in him. His late usefulness to FDR in the very last years of his life is something I've come to see as the cynical old asshole hedging his bets in case he was wrong about an afterlife with consequences when he was too old to enjoy the fruits of his degeneracy. I really have to say, the more I've come to know about Holmes the worse it's obvious that he was.
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Art Tatum - Buddy Defranco - Deep Night
Art Tatum, piano
Buddy DeFranco, clarinet
Red Callender, bass
Bill Douglass, drums
Hate Mail - I Knew That Crack About Red-Diaper Babies Would Piss Them Off
I'm coming to think that all of the Marxists in the United States have been secretly funded by the CIA or other such entities to discredit the real left. That's their one and only real effect in real life as opposed to play-lefty fantasy, propaganda and outright lies. Remember that the next time you read some alleged lefty in some allegedly lefty magazine telling you that voting in a protest vote for Bernie or whoever the Green Party fraud are running in 2020 is KEW-el.
Marxists can all, to a one of them, fuck off and die as far as I'm concerned. They have never done anything but damage and injure the real left.
In other announcements, I will try to remember to monitor the program of the upcoming Left Forum, it will probably be good for a few hollow laughs. I'll try to remember to, not that it's in the least bit important, as it hasn't been for the past sixty years.
Marxists can all, to a one of them, fuck off and die as far as I'm concerned. They have never done anything but damage and injure the real left.
In other announcements, I will try to remember to monitor the program of the upcoming Left Forum, it will probably be good for a few hollow laughs. I'll try to remember to, not that it's in the least bit important, as it hasn't been for the past sixty years.
On The Naivety Of Robert Mueller
Yesterday's attempt by Robert Mueller to set things right right in a nice, orderly, legalistic manner after nine weeks of his good buddy William Barr doing everything he could to ratfuck the public understanding of Mueller's report was widely praised but it was disgustingly inadequate. I, to tell you the truth, found some of my worst fears about Mueller confirmed when he tried to exonerate the actions of Barr. Considering the renewed howling for Democrats in the House to open an impeachment hearing that Mueller's short speech set off, it's remarkable that he doesn't seem to see that his buddy Barr's actions are no less clearly deserving impeachment.
I heard Ari Melber with two former DoJ prosecutors who mildly criticized Mueller for his naivety which, considering how long Mueller was at the top of politically appointed positions IN LAW ENFORCEMENT!, I don't buy that for a second. His reluctance to face the facts about another highly placed Republican who he worked and played with for decades is not based in innocence, it's based in a double standard, perhaps one similar to the one that another in those circles practiced, James Comey during the election of 2016.
Mueller's reluctance to testify in public is not an act of integrity, it's an act of grotesque irresponsibility. Suddenly, when it comes to this, the most important thing he has done to defend democracy and the rule of law, a guy who has testified numerous times to get those jobs, to report on his work to Congress in line with the requirements of the offices he held, the granite monument of integrity gets shy about doing that?
As we are constantly told these days, as Mueller implied yesterday, impeachment is not a judicial but a political act. As Mueller pointed out in defense of his refusal to bring an indictment, the DoJ regulations takes the prosecution and removal of a president out of the hands of those in the judicial and legal arm of the government and places it exclusively in the hands of Congress, especially the House, where that would have to start. Though that fact from Mueller, himself, makes his reluctance to inform that political action publicly an act of monumental irresponsibility.
I think Mueller's insistence that he gave the Congress everything they needed and now it's all up to them is irresponsible, as well. Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff and others in the leadership of the Congress have watched Democrats lose control of the House and regain it, only to have that pissed away by first Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrich and then Barack Obama to Paul Ryan, only to be regained again. They know better than almost anyone else possibly could what is required, now to protect and defend American democracy.
THEY KNOW IN THE END THAT STOPPING THE DANGERS TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY THAT MUELLER PARTIALLY EXPOSED WILL REQUIRE HIM TELLING WHAT HE KNOWS NOT ONLY TO THE HOUSE BUT TO THE PEOPLE WHO ARE THE ULTIMATE JURY THAT HAS TO BE CONVINCED.
Perhaps Mueller needs to be taken down a peg or two, made to dismount his high horse or wised up or to face the fact that his friend, Barr, is a clear and present danger to democracy and the United States because he pursues a strong-man fascist view of the presidency. Maybe it's one of those things or maybe it's a combination of some or all of them. I can tell you that I've had about enough of the myth of Robert Mueller.
I know that whenever I say that someone says "but he's a Vietnam vet," generally a line that comes from people who I suspect have no one within their families or close associates who were. I've got several family members who were and all of them seem to understand this situation better than Mueller. None of them enjoyed careers like the one Mueller clearly has enjoyed having with the financial and social and public advantages he has had.
And I will repeat something I've been saying over and over again WHY ISN'T THE MEDIA PUTTING PRESSURE ON THE GODDAMNED REPUBLICAN SENATE TO DO WHAT THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO DO TO PROTECT THE UNITED STATES FROM ITS ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC. I'm getting sick and tired of even Rachel Maddow's mantra on that.
I heard Ari Melber with two former DoJ prosecutors who mildly criticized Mueller for his naivety which, considering how long Mueller was at the top of politically appointed positions IN LAW ENFORCEMENT!, I don't buy that for a second. His reluctance to face the facts about another highly placed Republican who he worked and played with for decades is not based in innocence, it's based in a double standard, perhaps one similar to the one that another in those circles practiced, James Comey during the election of 2016.
Mueller's reluctance to testify in public is not an act of integrity, it's an act of grotesque irresponsibility. Suddenly, when it comes to this, the most important thing he has done to defend democracy and the rule of law, a guy who has testified numerous times to get those jobs, to report on his work to Congress in line with the requirements of the offices he held, the granite monument of integrity gets shy about doing that?
As we are constantly told these days, as Mueller implied yesterday, impeachment is not a judicial but a political act. As Mueller pointed out in defense of his refusal to bring an indictment, the DoJ regulations takes the prosecution and removal of a president out of the hands of those in the judicial and legal arm of the government and places it exclusively in the hands of Congress, especially the House, where that would have to start. Though that fact from Mueller, himself, makes his reluctance to inform that political action publicly an act of monumental irresponsibility.
I think Mueller's insistence that he gave the Congress everything they needed and now it's all up to them is irresponsible, as well. Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff and others in the leadership of the Congress have watched Democrats lose control of the House and regain it, only to have that pissed away by first Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrich and then Barack Obama to Paul Ryan, only to be regained again. They know better than almost anyone else possibly could what is required, now to protect and defend American democracy.
THEY KNOW IN THE END THAT STOPPING THE DANGERS TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY THAT MUELLER PARTIALLY EXPOSED WILL REQUIRE HIM TELLING WHAT HE KNOWS NOT ONLY TO THE HOUSE BUT TO THE PEOPLE WHO ARE THE ULTIMATE JURY THAT HAS TO BE CONVINCED.
Perhaps Mueller needs to be taken down a peg or two, made to dismount his high horse or wised up or to face the fact that his friend, Barr, is a clear and present danger to democracy and the United States because he pursues a strong-man fascist view of the presidency. Maybe it's one of those things or maybe it's a combination of some or all of them. I can tell you that I've had about enough of the myth of Robert Mueller.
I know that whenever I say that someone says "but he's a Vietnam vet," generally a line that comes from people who I suspect have no one within their families or close associates who were. I've got several family members who were and all of them seem to understand this situation better than Mueller. None of them enjoyed careers like the one Mueller clearly has enjoyed having with the financial and social and public advantages he has had.
And I will repeat something I've been saying over and over again WHY ISN'T THE MEDIA PUTTING PRESSURE ON THE GODDAMNED REPUBLICAN SENATE TO DO WHAT THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO DO TO PROTECT THE UNITED STATES FROM ITS ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC. I'm getting sick and tired of even Rachel Maddow's mantra on that.
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Given Who Is Asking, If You Really Wanted Me To Stop You'd Praise Me - Stupid Question In Stupid Mail
In an e-mail that encourages me to give up posting these meditations of politics and the wide range of relevant side issues, also music and radio drama, occasional stuff I am ashamed to admit falls to the level of a feuilleton - generally in response to a simpleton, I'll say in my defense - someone asks me why I've been doing this for the last number of years, assuring me "no one reads it".
Well, I know some people read it, though it's true, all of those hits that show up in the automated statistics I think I've looked at fewer than a dozen times might all be bots, though I get enough hate mail to prove SOMEONE is reading it, not to mention the occasional substantial and interesting comment. That Memorial Day poem of the other day, when I first posted it on my first blog got a comment from Left Rev. that said I wrote one of the better blogs no one comments on. Perhaps that early encouragement went to my head all these years. It's not as if I'm burdened with over-praise. I think if I got even a little more of that it would make me feel nervous, not encouraged. The last thing I want to feel is that I have to meet expectations. That would inhibit me.
I don't write things in the belief that thousands and thousands of influential and, to use the repulsive phrase I absolutely reject, "important people" will find ideas here that they will spread far and wide, I write things because writing is such a good way to both take a hard look at ideas you get and, in reviewing what you've thought, generate further ideas, to see connections (or rather possible connections) to notice connections that are obviously there but which people don't seem to see, etc. I wrote things a lot earlier than I ever went online or even before I had my first computer which had no modem of way of getting online. I taught myself shorthand out of a cheap paperback, Zinman's Rapid Writing, and used to scribble away for long periods of time and found it was a really good way of organizing your thinking. Once I could do that even faster by typing into a computer it was even more of an attraction. I was skeptical about these new personal computers at first and the first course I took in DOS certainly didn't encourage me to be less skeptical but, then I took one in word processing and I knew I'd never use a typewriter ever again - the nostalgia for typewriters is sheer lunacy though I'd certainly go back to doing it by hand.
As I said the other day my blogging was an outgrowth of typing out long comments during blog arguments and brawls, especially in reaction to some pretty horrific habits of thought among the alleged lefties of many of the popular blogs of the 000s. Finding out that some of the alleged bright lights among them were far more preppy-libertarians than egalitarian-democratic liberals was the fist one. Finding out that D.B. reputedly one of the big thinkers among them opposed the Fairness Doctrine might be the first incidence of realizing how stupid a lot of them were. Another one was reading supposed lefties using the term "trailer trash" mocking the victims of a tornado in Oklahoma even as they were recovering bodies, the barroom atheist blather, etc. In time those pieces all fit together and I realized a lot of them were going to do far more to damage the fight against Republican-fascism than they were going to help. They were a bunch of preppy-Ivy Leaguers and wannabees, people who wished they'd been red-diaper babies of the fabled and totally awful NYC left (as read in The Nation and workshopped at the Left Forum) who worshiped idiots and traitors and stooges and idiots who I have to admit still are to be found in many a more successful (but never successful enough to ever make a difference except for the worse) online blog, Twitter feed, podcast, youtube channel, etc.
I find that after my disillusion with Majority Report over their idiotic Bernie or Buster policy of undercutting Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, and other candidates who, unlike Bernie might, someday be president, that I don't even retain much in the way of affection for them. When we agree it is more than made up for by their idiocy. And if I don't feel for them, I certainly don't feel for more than one or two of those early bloggers of blogs I used to frequent. I looked at one of them right before I wrote this and see the boob still is holding a torch for Jeremy Corbyn, probably the worst or second worst Labour Party leader in the history of the party and a total disaster in terms of electoral politics. The guy is a total and complete idiot.
I figure if I'm going to write stuff out for myself, I'll post it. It doesn't hurt anyone. And it might annoy some people who I'd like to annoy.
Well, I know some people read it, though it's true, all of those hits that show up in the automated statistics I think I've looked at fewer than a dozen times might all be bots, though I get enough hate mail to prove SOMEONE is reading it, not to mention the occasional substantial and interesting comment. That Memorial Day poem of the other day, when I first posted it on my first blog got a comment from Left Rev. that said I wrote one of the better blogs no one comments on. Perhaps that early encouragement went to my head all these years. It's not as if I'm burdened with over-praise. I think if I got even a little more of that it would make me feel nervous, not encouraged. The last thing I want to feel is that I have to meet expectations. That would inhibit me.
I don't write things in the belief that thousands and thousands of influential and, to use the repulsive phrase I absolutely reject, "important people" will find ideas here that they will spread far and wide, I write things because writing is such a good way to both take a hard look at ideas you get and, in reviewing what you've thought, generate further ideas, to see connections (or rather possible connections) to notice connections that are obviously there but which people don't seem to see, etc. I wrote things a lot earlier than I ever went online or even before I had my first computer which had no modem of way of getting online. I taught myself shorthand out of a cheap paperback, Zinman's Rapid Writing, and used to scribble away for long periods of time and found it was a really good way of organizing your thinking. Once I could do that even faster by typing into a computer it was even more of an attraction. I was skeptical about these new personal computers at first and the first course I took in DOS certainly didn't encourage me to be less skeptical but, then I took one in word processing and I knew I'd never use a typewriter ever again - the nostalgia for typewriters is sheer lunacy though I'd certainly go back to doing it by hand.
As I said the other day my blogging was an outgrowth of typing out long comments during blog arguments and brawls, especially in reaction to some pretty horrific habits of thought among the alleged lefties of many of the popular blogs of the 000s. Finding out that some of the alleged bright lights among them were far more preppy-libertarians than egalitarian-democratic liberals was the fist one. Finding out that D.B. reputedly one of the big thinkers among them opposed the Fairness Doctrine might be the first incidence of realizing how stupid a lot of them were. Another one was reading supposed lefties using the term "trailer trash" mocking the victims of a tornado in Oklahoma even as they were recovering bodies, the barroom atheist blather, etc. In time those pieces all fit together and I realized a lot of them were going to do far more to damage the fight against Republican-fascism than they were going to help. They were a bunch of preppy-Ivy Leaguers and wannabees, people who wished they'd been red-diaper babies of the fabled and totally awful NYC left (as read in The Nation and workshopped at the Left Forum) who worshiped idiots and traitors and stooges and idiots who I have to admit still are to be found in many a more successful (but never successful enough to ever make a difference except for the worse) online blog, Twitter feed, podcast, youtube channel, etc.
I find that after my disillusion with Majority Report over their idiotic Bernie or Buster policy of undercutting Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, and other candidates who, unlike Bernie might, someday be president, that I don't even retain much in the way of affection for them. When we agree it is more than made up for by their idiocy. And if I don't feel for them, I certainly don't feel for more than one or two of those early bloggers of blogs I used to frequent. I looked at one of them right before I wrote this and see the boob still is holding a torch for Jeremy Corbyn, probably the worst or second worst Labour Party leader in the history of the party and a total disaster in terms of electoral politics. The guy is a total and complete idiot.
I figure if I'm going to write stuff out for myself, I'll post it. It doesn't hurt anyone. And it might annoy some people who I'd like to annoy.
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Stupid Mail and A Personal Note
That's the difference between someone who figures that everything is about him and those who figure that what composers said about how they intended their music to be played was as much their right as it was theirs to write the music. It's the difference between immature self-indulgence and intelligent maturity. He goes for the immature as a default due to his self-indulgence. I think he was an only child of the worst type.
Personal note: My chronic illness is kicking up, either that or the end is neigh, I don't know which of those I'd rather it be. I might write something substantial later.
Update: I was reading this right before I typed that out. I was in a different frame of mind when I put that "e" in there and I'm not in the least bit ashamed of it.
You know, maybe I put misspellings in knowing you can't resist giving me free publicity when I do. Not that I really expect any of those dolts to read something, I mean, they don't read Duncan, the reason he gave up writing much. Though that piece about Labour he has up now shows when he does he probably shouldn't. His hero Corbyn frequently did what he's slamming Campbell for doing now. Corbyn has dictatorial tendencies matched with election losing skills that, no doubt, the Tories are only too pleased to exploit. Corbyn is an idiot.
Update 2: Go to the sidebar and find the quote from Bertrand Russell, that was put there to describe what he's doing when he says "I wish I was making that up" because it's what he's doing when he says that. He's too stupid to understand what was said, there's a lot of that at the rump commenting community at Duncan Black's blog. It ain't what it was in 2005.
Personal note: My chronic illness is kicking up, either that or the end is neigh, I don't know which of those I'd rather it be. I might write something substantial later.
Update: I was reading this right before I typed that out. I was in a different frame of mind when I put that "e" in there and I'm not in the least bit ashamed of it.
You know, maybe I put misspellings in knowing you can't resist giving me free publicity when I do. Not that I really expect any of those dolts to read something, I mean, they don't read Duncan, the reason he gave up writing much. Though that piece about Labour he has up now shows when he does he probably shouldn't. His hero Corbyn frequently did what he's slamming Campbell for doing now. Corbyn has dictatorial tendencies matched with election losing skills that, no doubt, the Tories are only too pleased to exploit. Corbyn is an idiot.
Update 2: Go to the sidebar and find the quote from Bertrand Russell, that was put there to describe what he's doing when he says "I wish I was making that up" because it's what he's doing when he says that. He's too stupid to understand what was said, there's a lot of that at the rump commenting community at Duncan Black's blog. It ain't what it was in 2005.
What It Was Was "AI"
Update: And now someone wants to comment about high priced sunscreens and rhinoplasty on that piece I wrote about Katha Pollitt using Laudato Si to slam religion. Though maybe it's just trying to tell me that I've got a big nose.
Call me suspicious but I doubt any human is so stupid they would try to put random and obscure commercial messages on four year old blog posts on an obscure blog that gets mostly hate mail the owner doesn't choose to post and who never posts those ad placements. This has been going on for years, by now some human would have given up. I think what this is, is that "artificial intelligence" that military nerds want to have "making decisions" about dropping bombs on people. Clearly, such "intelligence" is incapable of effectively placing ads where someone will read them as some highly credentialed sci-guys and their bosses in military establishments want to trust them bombing combatants and not randomly "chosen" civilians.
"Artificial intelligence" is a scientistic delusion though a belief in it might end up getting lots or maybe all of us killed.
Update: And now the mindless "intelligence" is trying to get me to post a line about exercise bands on the same piece. And yet these are the machines and algorithms that we're being asked to allow the power of "decision making" on life or death issues, to cut off from government services, access to credit, etc. "Artificial intelligence" is a product of the gullibility of smart but not wise People with a financial and professional motive in believing their own bullshit.
Call me suspicious but I doubt any human is so stupid they would try to put random and obscure commercial messages on four year old blog posts on an obscure blog that gets mostly hate mail the owner doesn't choose to post and who never posts those ad placements. This has been going on for years, by now some human would have given up. I think what this is, is that "artificial intelligence" that military nerds want to have "making decisions" about dropping bombs on people. Clearly, such "intelligence" is incapable of effectively placing ads where someone will read them as some highly credentialed sci-guys and their bosses in military establishments want to trust them bombing combatants and not randomly "chosen" civilians.
"Artificial intelligence" is a scientistic delusion though a belief in it might end up getting lots or maybe all of us killed.
Update: And now the mindless "intelligence" is trying to get me to post a line about exercise bands on the same piece. And yet these are the machines and algorithms that we're being asked to allow the power of "decision making" on life or death issues, to cut off from government services, access to credit, etc. "Artificial intelligence" is a product of the gullibility of smart but not wise People with a financial and professional motive in believing their own bullshit.
Monday, May 27, 2019
Memorial Day 2006
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 name.
Countries give speeches. Speeches about words,
Speeches about people too far away to know.
And I can't tell you. You had to see them. In their towns. Both sides.
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 name.
Countries give speeches. Speeches about words,
Speeches about people too far away to know.
And I can't tell you. You had to see them. In their towns. Both sides.
Forgive Me, But I Don't Believe They Actually Read The Post
According to google translate, the comment that was left, in Polish, on this piece I wrote taking apart Katha Politt's illogical slamming of Pope Francis' great, great environmental encyclical, Laudato Si, translates as.
"A variety of PVC fences is also available for peasants."
"A variety of PVC fences is also available for peasants."
Sigfried Karg Elert - Nearer My God to Thee
Garrett F. Martin, organ
Hearing the last movement of Ives' symphony reminded me that the chorus is intoning what would, to Ives, have been the setting of the hymn Nearer My God To Thee, which reminded me of this piece which Karg-Elert wrote on the sinking of the Titanic.
Sometimes I think if I had it all to do over again I'd have concentrated on playing organ. Then, other times I think if I had it all to do over again I'd have done something else. Ah, well.
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