By Something Like Popular Demand, I Respond To Simels

 "Simps gets upset when I diss the commercial entertainment industry."

SHORTER SPARKY: Rock-and-roll and comic books caused Juvenile Delinquency.

They would seem to have contributed to your illiteracy and inability to draw a rational conclusion about what someone else said. 

As to taking the potential of comic books being a danger due to the content those hold seriously, I don't have to stand alone in that worry,  it's clear that those who produce them share that worry and it's clear that some of those who draw them intend them to have malignant effects:

For a lot of Americans and non-New Yorkers, the number “212” holds no special significance. Neither does the number “51.” But for comic book artist Ardian Syaf, who slipped the numbers into Marvel’s newest X-Men comic book, they represent an anti-Semitic, anti-Christian message.

It’s particularly inflammatory and disappointing that it was smuggled into the X-Men, a team that’s represented inclusivity, empathy, and tolerance.

Syaf is Indonesian artist, and in Indonesia, “212” denotes a mass protest against Jakarta’s Christian Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama. Meanwhile, as the comics news websites Bleeding Cool and ComicBook.com explain, the number 51 refers to verse in the Quran (Chapter Surah 5, verse 51) that’s been interpreted by those protesting Gov. Purnama in Indonesia to: “Muslims should not appoint the Jews and Christians as their leader.”

In the premiere issue of X-Men: Gold which came out last week, there are a few instances where Syaf surreptitiously inserted the numbers into the comic. You can see an example in the panel below, which features Kitty Pryde, the Jewish-American leader of the X-Men, talking to civilians, and “212” appears on the awning of a building in the background of the scene . . .   

And that use of comic books goes all the way back to before Simps or I were born, it's a fact of the history of comic books.

The Nazi-controlled government in German-occupied France produced the Vica comic during World War II as a propaganda tool against the Allied forces. The comics represent Nazi influence and perspective within French society. The three issues are Vica au Paradis de l’U.R.S.S, Vica contre le service secret anglais, and Vica défie l’Oncle Sam. The author, Vincent Krassousky (also known as Vica), disappeared in the late 1940s.

The history of comics to promote antisemitism alone is a long one.  The Library of Congress, among its collections, has a trove of German antisemetic cartoons going back to the 1890s.   If you think that the future Nazis might not have imbibed such stuff in their formative years, you are as stupid as an ACLU attorney pretends to be and "justices" on the Supreme Court, as well. 

Pop kulcha carries a far higher potential for danger BECAUSE IT IS POPULAR AND MANY, MANY MORE PEOPLE CONSUME IT THAN THEY DO ACADEMIC SCRIBBLAGE AND BABBLEAGE.   

As for neo-Nazi rock music, for crying out loud, Simps, I thought you were supposed to be an expert in rock music?   I hate it and even I know about that.   You think that doesn't carry any dangers?   If all that John Lennon pretending to be a flower child peace and lovechild junk is supposed to have a positive effect, you can't pretend that without admitting the potential of its opposite to gain influence.  The ACLU line that all this stuff was innocuous was always a lie, maybe that's one of the reasons they duped so many idiots into believing there was a "right to lie" so much of their legal mumbo-jumbo were blatant lies of that kind. 

Update:  And, while I was doing the minimal amount of research necessary to respond to this, I found out that I wasn't the only one who noticed that what I started calling "fascist chic" in the early Reagan years was a real thing, especially as "Nazi chic".   

Nazi chic is the use of style, imagery, and paraphernalia in clothing and popular culture related to Nazi-era Germany, especially when used for taboo-breaking or shock value rather than out of genuine sympathies with Nazism or Nazi ideology.

Its popularity began in the 1970s with the emergence of the Heavy metal, punk and glam rock movements: the Sex Pistols' first television appearance occurred with a person of their entourage wearing a swastika. Nazi chic was later used in the fashion industry.  The trend, while having originated in the Western culture, by the late 20th and early 21st century became particularly popular in Asia. Nazi chic also partly inspired some of the fashion of the leather subculture.  

I noticed it, especially, in the themes and content of Hollywood shit.  Then in pulp publishing.  I associated it with Reagan and it has continued since then all through pop kulcha.   I would call "Celebrity Apprentice,"  a live action comic, as being a part of the wider phenomenon, it gave us Trump as a president, already.

 Update:   45 mins ago
Oh good grief, Sparky, this is just too easy. It's like shooting ducks in a barrel with an AR-15.

Here's a hint, clueless: my use of the phrase "Juvenile Delinquency" was a specific reference to a spcific time in recent American history. Specifically, the 50s, i.e. when humorless prig idiots like you decided that Batman and Robin (obvious homosexuals) and Elvis Presley (lock up your daughters!) were corrupting our youth and had to be stopped, lest the Commies take over!!!

In other words, nothing in your above rant has the slightest relevance to the point I was making, but of course since you have no idea how humor and irony work, that's not exactly a surprise.

None of that has the slightest relevance to the crap in your rant

 I'm not bound to argue on the ever-shifting bull shit that you shift to when you've got nuttin,'  the fact is you generally have nothing.  

 Second: I've been telling you for well over a decade that you should attain a 4th grade ability to use the dictionary, here's what Merriam Webster online - you don't even have to open an ink on paper book, Stupy - says as to the origin of "juvenile delinquency."

juvenile delinquency
noun
1: conduct by a juvenile characterized by antisocial behavior that is beyond parental control and therefore subject to legal action
2: a violation of the law committed by a juvenile and not punishable by death or life imprisonment

Word History
First Known Use

1816, in the meaning defined at sense 1

As with Trump, clearly someone who was, I believe, born about the time you were and whose rhetorical methods you share, as well,  you seem to believe that the world began about the time you became conscious of it and know nothing else.  There's a lot of that around Eschaton, one of the reason adults fled from there long ago.  Also, nothing outside of the limited repertoire of American, mid-brow so-called erudition exists.   

Shorter Stupy, Nazi and pre-Nazi antisemetic and other propaganda had no effect, at all.   Hey, Simps, the Supreme Court holds the same massively stupid idea, apparently. 

Update 2:

So yes -- you ARE saying that 50s comic books and rock n roll caused Juvenile Delinquency. Good, I'm glad you've cleared that up. :-)

Simps, you're the only one who mentioned "50s comic books and rock and roll. . . "  I'm nobt invested in that narrative.   I doubt most juvenile delinquents of that era were doing much looking at ink on paper.  Though they may have been listening to pop music shit.   I'd think they got most of it through Hollywood crap, it's easier to consume.  

So, let me guess, you heard something about this in the media or through some mid-brow media geared to the geezers with college credentials but no real education.   Let me guess, someone wrote a book about it, you watched the report and didn't read the book.   You're like Susan Stamberg late of NPR.  She couldn't open her mouth without a cliche coming out of it and you can't type on a keyboard without typing them.   That's the difference between having a college diploma and being educated.
 

A Frosty Footnote

IN MY RECENT READING VACATION into the Library of America volume of Robert Frosts' poems and prose, there is this 1951 half-rhyming-limerick that demonstrates even as the news about the Nazi death camps and other Axis genocidal atrocities was sinking in, eugenics was still being pushed by some of the best and brightest among us.

Pares Continuas Fututiones

Says our Harvard Neo Malthusian
"We can't keep the poor from futution;
But by up to date feeding,
We can keep them from breeding."
Which seems a licentious conclusion!
 
Of course, being a sworn enemy of eugenics and Malthusian economics and the "best and the brightest" who push those as "a benefit to humanity and the world," and a long time hater of Harvard (we get lots of them here North of Boston, as Frost would have known better than most),   I had to find out who the Harvard boy who was pushing that in 1951 was.  Luckily the book provided that answer in the many very helpful notes in the back of the book.  

Harvard Neo Malthusian]  In the letter to [Louis Henry] Cohn [dated September 21, 1951], Frost wrote that James B. Conant, a former professor of chemistry and the president of Harvard University (1933-53), as a "mouthpiece" for science had "undertaken for it to make a the planet less uncomfortably crowded with a new kind of manna . . .  a contraceptive to be taken by mouth so we can stop breeding without having to stop futution."  

No doubt tricking them into it or forcing them into eating it was the clever scheme.  The elite, especially the elite in science and the "science"  that really matters, economics, never seem to ever tire of thinking of ways of eliminating large numbers of People from the human future.  And to find ways to insult or belittle their own intelligence in their monumental arrogance.   

Conant was a great progressive who decided to push for a meritocracy as an alternative to the traditional American elite but never seemed to really understand that equality was the real cure for what was wrong with the world.  He opposed real equality, equality in results, for that guarantee of the elite always remaining elite, "equality of opportunity."  I'd love to find out if he ever tried to stop legacy admissions to the college he led, though it doesn't seem to have happened.   As I recall he did vote for the cap of 15% of Jewish students at Harvard, instituted by the previous president.   It's largely due to him that we got the college board examinations that merely reinforced the status of those with wealth whose parents sent them to better schools.  He really was kind of a pudding-head about how the reforms he instituted would actually work out. Perhaps he saw opening up admissions to a wider section of the already wealthy and, so privileged as progress.  Maybe it's just he wanted more regional diversity of the elite at Harvard.   

Unfortunately I can't find out where he made the suggestion, though I suspect it is in the Terry Lectures at Yale, he was the 1951 honoree.   Unfortunately, I don't have a copy to look at to find out.

I don't imagine he imagined feeding his contraceptives to the most dangerous families in the world, those who he, no doubt, would see as meritorious, many of them Ivy League grads and others like them.  I could take the time and research and give you a list of such dangerous people born around that time and after who I'm sure Conant wouldn't have considered the world would be better off without.  The majority on the Supreme Court and many in the Congress, for a start.
 
As I most recently mentioned around the centennial of America's most evil war criminal at large, Henry Kissinger, it was in contemplating his evil that I first realized there were many extremely intelligent People the world would be better off without but there was no such thing as a good one that you could say that about.  And a lot of them are certainly not on any list Conant would have had about who should not be allowed to have offspring.  I'd certainly put the children of George H.W. Bush on a list of those the world would probably be better off  if George and Babs had been fed contraceptives.  I could go for the idea of having prevented those lists of Ivy Leaguers and their ilk who have duped Americans into believing there was "a right to lie."  And Ron Desantis who is not as far removed from them as they'd ever want anyone to notice.

And it's such a pudding-headed idea that was bound to not happen.  For a start it would mean feeding the poor and the best and brightest aren't, on balance, big on that.  And it wouldn't have worked.  Of course, if People have economic security, if they have a decent life with prospects of being able to live out their elder years in security, most People opt for choosing a smaller family for themselves, that's pretty much what experience has shown.  

I don't know, maybe those rhymes work better in the old style of pronouncing Latin, my teacher, from the generation right after Frost, taught me the more up-to-date reconstruction of Latin pronunciation.  Or maybe Frost pronounced the English differently. In the notes on it Frost pointed out that he was referencing a particularly blue verse by Catullus, poem no 32 that includes these lines,  

. . . sed domi maneas paresque nobis
novem continuas fututiones . . .

The note translates that as,

but stay at home and prepare yourself
for nine consecutive copulations

I'd have thought "prepare ourselves" would be more accurate.

It's all a far cry from the popular imagination of Frost, that boy improbably swinging from those friggin' birches.  

I'll Say It Again, The ACLU Line Is That Trump Has The Right To Yell Fire In A Crowded Theater - Perhaps a last response on this, for now

THE COMPLAINT that I have repeatedly called America's evil tradition of white supremacy our indigenous form of fascism is, I think, a complaint of those who are largely white and, especially, privileged by wealth, whiteness, maleness, straightness, etc.  complaining that flows from never having to have thought about the consequences of the political power and legal power of white supremacy under and through the Constitution, the laws, the habits of the white majority in the United States. A power that rules far more states in 2023 than it did before 1964 when the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were adopted.   I'll expand on that because white supremacy is not alone, though it is the most central locus of corruption, anti-equality and anti-democratic success in the United States.  It is the contemporary version of what the abolitionists called "slave power" which never really ended, only briefly eclipsed in two periods, the Reconstruction after the Civil War and the brief period in which the 1960s civil rights laws were in full effect, something which the "free press" rulings of the Warren Court started to end with the election of Nixon in 1968.  

It was one of the most important insights of my lifetime of thinking about the history, the politics, the legal apparatus, institutions, etc. that really govern us when I realized that for most of our history in most places in the United States Native Americans, Black People, other Peoples of Color, Women, especially those who were not white, various other minority groups, the poor have lived under a degree of fascism.  At times and in some places as deadly as any European fascism, in few times and in few places has that not been, the case to some extent.  In every time in our history being a person in those groups has been the equivalent of wearing a sign that person was Jewish in Nazi Germany or in medieval Europe, the parallels are so obvious that the same word, ghetto, was used for places where Black People were relegated to living in in cities under de facto as well as de jure segregation.

They directly experienced that even as the privileged population didn't much and pretended that was democracy and freedom.  The genocidal policy of the colonies and then states, the land stealing that was as much a part of that genocide as outright murder is not only identical to the policies of Nazis and other fascists, it was cited in fascist and Nazi literature as an example of the possibilities of their own intended genocides.  The enslavement, terrorism, murder, economic exploitation and oppression of Black People is another indisputable experience of life under fascism.  The terror campaign against Women is so embedded into all of those things, especially into the culture of, not only the United States but the world that Women largely don't notice the dangers and restrictions they live under constantly.  I could as easily note that male supremacy is another indigenous form of fascism.  Though the progress for white Women, especially those with money and wealthy families was far faster and more extensive than for than Women without money from poor families.  In the decades of white supremacist complaints about affirmative action, I never once recall hearing one of its opponents mention the foremost beneficiaries of affirmative action, white women, especially white women with wealth.  That fascism on a sliding scale is also true for LGBTQ+ People.  Rich white gay men, on a whole have far safer lives than Gay Men of Color. As I mentioned the other day Trans Women of Color are among those under the strongest terror campaign right now resulting in them having among the highest murder rates of any identifiable group.  The privileges available to those who are privileged, of course, goes up as wealth goes up, poor whites may have it better than even middle class or even some affluent People of Color but they are still nothing like equal to wealthy white People, especially the filthy rich.  A lot of that can depend on how bad your job is, as well.  The second part of the story of the fascist genocide against Native Americans and the domination of People of Color and other minorities is that poor whites got largely suckered by that scheme.  The Republican-fascist hearings on gas stoves and ceiling fans is the modern day version of how those who really rule us suckered them with distractions from how the system really didn't work for them.   The overwhelming majority of the "free press" was part of the peddling of that suckering job, the part that didn't was always a small fraction of the "free press".  And I'm not talking only about the tabloid and cabloid level of media, most of the most august organs of the media have been part of it too.  The entertainment division, getting the most eyes and ears, the biggest part of that.  

In those lists I've posted this week of the stars of "civil liberties,"- lists not chosen by me but either chosen by authors of articles or the self-chosen lawyers who wrote legal papers -  the whiteness, the maleness, the straightness, the Ivy Leagueness and the affluence of them could not be more obvious.  I could go through articles written by white members of the scribbling class panicked over lawyers of Color and Women in the ACLU who express deep skepticism over the traditional "free speech-press" ideology of that group and of the putrid "civil liberties" industry.  It's something that you can also find it in university and college faculties in which it is largely white male faculty, generally those with tenure and full positions (and their faculty wives) who whine the hardest when students won't put up with their casual racism, their sexism, their many habits and expressions which make the lives of students of Color, Women, and members of other minority groups more difficult, not to mention any tendencies they have to favor those they might consciously or unconsciously perceive as people like themselves, the male, the straight, the white, the affluent, the already advantaged.*

I will point out that in many academic fields, that is entirely relevant to the quality of what they put out as scholarship.  For example, the difference between an historian who writes a hagiographic and seriously covered up account of, say a Justice John Marshall and someone such as Paul Finkleman who finds out how deeply he was enriched by slavery and by the rulings he made while on the Court, the difference is  extremely important.  White supremacy by slave owners and their judicial allies has certainly had and has a direct effect on Peoples lives.  The historians who could write biographies of a Christopher Columbus while ignoring his, the first genocide against Natives of the Americas, the continuation of that by the "founding fathers" and the entire history of American government UNDER THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS, are the opposite of innocuous in their effect.  The mainstream of academic writing and on up in malignant influence in that short list above, to the most malignant of that in entertainment tells a serious lie about history as serious and dangerous as Holocaust denial.  Yet such academic work and the belief of it plays a vital role in constructing our indigenous fascism which has had throughout our history and has enormous power today - the House of Representatives and Supreme Court are dominated by it right now - white supremacy.  The flip side of that is the racist, sexist, hetero-sexist romance of the founding of the country, the development of it, the antebellum South, "the noble lost cause," "the west" and even such absurd variations as the "rugged independence of New England Yankees," (is there any region of the country that doesn't claim they're the home of "rugged independence"?  Those are all unrealistic, and damaging non-realities that inform our imaginations of the country and the place of those we stupidly consider unlike ourselves.  The role that regionalism and ginned up regional resentment plays in our endangerment is a related issue.  The scribbling classes have caused more harm in that than helped, if they hadn't, it would have greatly diminished instead of become more exacerbated, just like all of those other things.  And on towards the most powerful expressions of that, such as the hagiographic bull-shit "biography" of Alexander Hamilton that got turned into that rap and boogie musical that so seriously lied about him, turning one of the foremost enemies of equality and democracy into a heroic figure for the mid-brow and lower.  

And I do insist that you add to academic stuff, popular and entertainment writing and productions to that and add the damage those do to Women, People of Color, LGBTQ People and so many others. So many Americans get what they imagine they know about such things from fictitious TV and movie writing, song and dance musical comedy, garbage "historical" novels and such crap gets People elected to offices and, from there, appointed to courts.  I'd bet that fewer than one in a thousand Americans who consume such garbage on TV and in other garbage media would have ever read an academic non-fiction work of any kind.

If "free speech" absolutism, if "free press" absolutism were going to produce a more perfect union, economic justice, equal justice under law, domestic tranquility, . . . that would have happened by now.  Instead we are all seriously in danger of an overtly fascist government under Trumpian  Republican-fascism as the "civil liberties" lawyers preen in their purity and rake in the donations and the corporations and billionaires have far more "speech" and virtually all of the "press" to themselves.  Don't forget the role of the "civil liberties" industry in the Buckley v Valeo decision which declared money to be "speech" and, so, created the most incredible reallocation of "speech" and the most potent of that, in the media, to those with the most money.  I have no doubt that donations of thanks came their way from those so obscenely endowed.  The media has been constantly sandbagging the only President we have between us and that for the past two and a half years, after they witnessed the most nearly successful insurrection against the United States since the Civil War.

Given what the history of the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry has resulted in, the ability of the media to lie about Democratic politicians and liberals and civil rights activists, minority groups, Women, etc.  The declaration that "money is speech" in Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United opening up dark money and, so the direct interference with American democracy by billionaires foreign and domestic as seen in 2016 and all subsequent election cycles, has resulted in a myriad of other such dangers, probably the most serious dangers to American democracy in our history,  I don't think the friggin' "civil libertarians" care what they bring as long as the donations keep going in and they can present themselves as ersatz heroes, just as that monumental liar and truth suppressor Lillian Hellman did with the help of one of those ersatz heroes.  

I have seen through the slogans of "civil liberties" and see that, by and large, AND IN THE TOTAL RESULTS OF THE "CIVIL LIBERTIES" INDUSTRY that they have been most effectively a force for furthering our most dangerous form of fascism, that which has been embedded in the United States since before its founding, all of those various indigenous fascisms.  

Their insistence of striving for from some daffy notion of "even handed" "objective" "fair" letting all opinions flourish and seeing which side wins, instead of the only legitimate goal for egalitarian democratic governance, equality FOR PEOPLE, of the ability of us to be governed by a government BASED ON A REALISTICALLY INFORMED VOTING POPULATION, and to the establishment and perpetuation of egalitarian democracy, economic justice, a decent, safe life for everyone couldn't possibly be more of a habit of those with privilege.  It's such a stupidly legitimate thing, "even handedness" a "level playing field" "impartiality" but only if you're dishonest enough to deny that there is no such even condition, no level field, and the nature of the legal apparatus could not be more partial to those with the wealth and privilege

Let me ask, who would have been the worse if the ideas of Nazism had successfully been suppressed in Germany in the 1920s and 30s?  Who would have been worse off if the calls for genocide had been entirely suppressed in the 1990s?   I can tell you who would have been better off if the Bill Clinton administration had ignored the doctrine of "free speech-press" absolutism and destroyed the radio tower of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines as they were broadcasting encouragement to commit genocide and announcing the hiding places of those who were being murdered, those who were being murdered.   I have every confidence that if Bill Clinton had taken that opportunity to do the right thing, the ACLU style "civil libertarians" would have been besides themselves as they sat on their asses on North American in perfect, privileged white-collar safety.

I mentioned those prerequisites of egalitarain democracy that appear nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights and hardly matter to our "justice system,"  adequate food, drinkable water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, the right to a good education, . . . That those are left out is not only a glaring inadequacy of our Constitutional notions and, also, our law, they are symptomatic of the kind of privilege that those who wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those who were permitted to vote for it - the small minority of even those who were legally eligible to vote in a ratification process that was as rigged as anything the Republican-fascists do to our elections today.  That they neglected to specify that there is a right to tell the truth but there is no right to lie, that People who are slandered and libeled and the subject of whipped up mob action and attack have a right to their reputation and safety is due, no doubt, to their own knowledge that they and those they cared about were not in serious danger of the sort that People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ and members of other minority groups live under their entire conscious lives.  Of course it wouldn't have occurred to the rich, white, almost exclusively Protestant men who gave us the inadequate 18th century Constitution and Bill of Rights, the 19th century men who put most of the amendments to it in that those things were far more important than their abbreviated slogans of "free speech" and "free press" which has been used to destroy the lives and rights of scores of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans throughout our history.

I really do mean it when I say that I despise the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry.  I am entirely sincere and I've repeatedly said why I went from a dolt who donated money to them to, after the Skokie case, opposing them.  I've done a lot of reading about them and the consequences of their activities, their seedier alliances with some of the most dangerous industries and individuals and corporations in our country, their advocacy for those who, being part of that long and successful tradition of indigenous American fascism, unsurprisingly succeed where the long and hard struggle for equality and Civil Rights is continually thwarted under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  That struggle and temporary success, only to be struck down by the Supreme Court, other courts, often with "civil liberties" briefs on behalf of wealth, power and white supremacy,  through elections in which those for whom the loudest, most frequent lies told and peddled through the "free press," again with ACLU style advocacy on their sice, win and install Republican-fascists, Quisling Democrats.  That pattern is long enough in the United States to tell us some important things about what's wrong with our system.  The "civil liberties" advocacy of the ALCU is a glaring example of how those impediments will always produce that result, under the Constitution, under the Bill of Rights, under "the rule of law" under the mythology that the "civil liberties" industry was set up as a bulwark to American liberty while it does the bidding of corporations and fascists and Nazis to flourish and expand till now, when they tell us that a Trump has the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater and to escape consequences for himself when the intended and entirely predictable results happen.   

How stupid could those Ivy League lawyers be?  Or how insouciantly enabling of those results that crush equality?   How much stupider are liberals to continue to support it?   
 
* Reading this over it reminded me of the time I read about a judge who said the hardest thing he had ever had to do on the bench was to give a prison sentence to "a young man from a good family,"  by which he meant someone like him, like his family.  It makes you wonder how many kids unlike him and his social class he'd sent to prison without a second thought or even with great edification and job satisfaction. 

Update:  Simple Simps Says: 

"And on towards the most powerful expressions of that, such as the hagiographic bull-shit "biography" of Alexander Hamilton that got turned into that rap and boogie musical that so seriously lied about him, turning one of the foremost enemies of equality and democracy into a heroic figure for the mid-brow and lower. "

SHORTER SPARKY: "LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RISE OF FASCISM IN THE UNITED STATES!!!"

I don't know what's sadder, that you actually believe this shit or that you're so predictable about peddling it at the drop of a hat.

Well, I did stipulate "and lower."   No, he's responsible for a seriously wrong piece of seriously misleading B-Way musical tripe.  Ron Chernow wrote the inadequate biography he used.   A novel about real figures in history is bound to be dishonest, a movie even more so, probably a musical is about the most probable to entirely distort history, and I am including opera.  Theatrical treatment of history is probably far more dangerous than an inadequate book treatment,  it was one of the things I learned to my horror at Eschaton that even people with PhD's were likely to stupidly assume that plays written about actual history was, you know, actual history.  Derbes and Gromit shocked me when they said that Inherit the Wind was based on history when it totally distorted the history of the Scopes trial.   And they're miles and miles ahead of a pop music, uh, . . . "scholar" such as yourself.

Update 2:   Simple Simps Says, Again. 

You're so right, Sparky. It only Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice hadn't written EVITA, Argentina would be an idyllic liberal democracy today.

 I post these just so some newcomer who hasn't seen him in inaction will believe me if I mention him.

Simps gets upset when I diss the commercial entertainment industry.   Even resorting to an idiotic defense of Donald and Vankie's favoritest musical of all times, I don't remember how many times Trump claimed they went on daddy daughter dates to see it together.   I think it gave both of them ideas, well stupid "ideas" are ideas of a sort, that they might not have had if they hadn't seen it. 

How Twisted Is It?

A Friend Of Mine suggested that I google "chastity" and see what comes up.   Mostly, none of it was chastity and none of it was chaste.  Especially on Youtube.

I haven't been so surprised since shortly after going online I innocently googled "bears" and what came up were not bears.   And I'd known about "bears" already.

Truly, there is nothing that can't be turned into a sexual fetish, even abstaining from sex can be.   People are strange. 

Wishing For A Low Overhead Halloween And Its Charms

Update:  RMJ does a much better post for the day.

I USED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN before it became seriously big business.  It was trick-o-treating, we never did that in our family.   After the ladies of the Sodality in my town stopped having their low-overhead kids Halloween party, we mostly just had the parties at school, I never dressed up in a costume for it I don't think any of my siblings did, either.  But it was a bit of harmless fun, seeing some of the cleverer though never elaborate costumes people dressed in.  One I recall was probably the least intelligent boy in my second-grade class had a paper rocket ship costume with just his face and arms outside of it.  It didn't last more than a few minutes, sort of like a rocket.  I was glad for his cleverness, maybe the height of that in his life. 

It was fun to see the strange cookys and things that kids brought in from home.  Our mother didn't do elaborate cookys, pumpkin cut outs with candy corn for eyes and nose.   I remember in an early grade one of the girls proudly brought in the quite burned ones she'd made "all by herself"  I remember eating one out of politeness and thinking it actually wasn't that bad. 

Now it's all commercialized, house decorations were probably the thing that killed it off for me.  Though adult Halloween parties took away a lot of the charm of it before then.  Horror movies, blah!   Hollywood getting involved in anything is a charm killer.   Halloween should be in person, no-frills.   Of course, now, children get stuffed with candy year-round, every day.   Hearing how much they collect today makes me wonder how non-special that is.   I remember the townies bringing in their candy the next day,  I don't remember feeling deprived.  

I think I'll go out and look at the moon late tonight, maybe walk through our local cemetery, maybe I'll leave a muffin out as a soul cake.  Something with seeds so the animals will eat it.  Then I'll celebrate All Saints and All Souls days.   Not the Day of the Dead, that's going the way of American Halloween.  

Update:  Simps rises from his crypt:

"Horror movies, blah! Hollywood getting involved in anything is a charm killer." Jeebus, Sparky, could you be any more predictable? Or be more of a joyless, emotionally crippled asshole?

Stupy, grow up.   You've gone from puberty to senility without any interval of adulthood in between.  

The ACLU is about the worst bargain American liberals have ever bought into - Another Answer

SO YOU WANT MORE EVIDENCE that the "civil liberties" racket is the game of affluent white men who went to elite training grounds of privilege and making stupid arguments on their behalf?  How about the three who wrote the ACLU brief saying that it would be terrible, just terrible, if judges didn't keep Trump from inciting violence, threatening witnesses and court staff and polluting the jury pool?

Brett Max Kaufman - Stanford University and the University of Texas School of Law

Ben Wizner - Harvard College, Harvard University, NYU School of Law

Brian Hauss - Yale University and Harvard Law School

In the NPR story on the ACLU siding with a man whose words are known to incite his cult to threaten and intimidate and commit violence it said,

The ACLU team acknowledged a "serious risk" that Trump could inspire his political supporters to violence. But their court filing said the First Amendment doesn't give the judge license to gag him.

"The mere fact that others have threatened actions against trial participants after hearing Defendant's words is not enough," the ACLU said.

Seriously, how stupid can you be to graduate from their schools?   How stupid are judges and "justices" to buy their bullshit?   If they were to argue the famous case that Holmes jr. imagined, a man shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, they'd claim that he was blameless and wasn't responsible for all those people who trampled others to death to escape.  That he had a "First Amendment" right to say whatever he wanted to.  That IS how stupid their claim is.
 

In short, until someone gets maimed or killed, they've got no problem with a situation that risks the maiming and killing of witnesses, court staff and others and peddling lies to the jury pool.  AND THEY HOLD THE ONE WHO INCITED THEM HAS NO CULPABILITY IN INCITING THEM.   No doubt that if Trump's goons were brought up on charges, once Trump's known attempts to incite them were brought to trial, the same ACLU assholes would demand that a link to Trump be proved beyond any possible rational standard of judging that to have happened.

"Free speech" and "freedom of the press" is an ideological absolute with these assholes, the ACLU and the "civil liberties" racket have learned they can sucker liberals with those slogans and they can get big money from the media and others with a financial interest in being allowed to lie with impunity and push even the most dangerous lies.  They have no problem with the weaponization of the media, the internet, hate-talk, etc. because allowing that is in their financial and professional interest and they figure it's no skin off of them.  That's the case with all of these "civil liberties" outfits.

Their ass-covering with allegedly aiding civil rights efforts and other such things which are of vital interest to liberals is more than wiped out by their other advocacy, especially their enabling exactly what they will smarmily admit is a "serious risk" even as that risk has resulted in more than half a century of fascist ascendancy in the United States, the reinvigoration of our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, its allies in imported ideologies such as Nazism, and Republican-fascism WHICH HAS ALREADY STACKED THE SUPREME COURT WITH THOSE WHO ARE DESTROYING ALL OF THE PROGRESS MADE TOWARDS EQUALITY IN THOSE FIFTY YEARS OF "FREE SPEECH" "FREE PRESS" ABSOLUTISM.  And much of what has been done since the Civil War.  

The ACLU is about the worst bargain American liberals have ever bought into.  Its Ivy-League and Ivy-equivalent lawyers and staff aren't so stupid as to not realize what they enable and support with their work and they certainly haven't missed that their clients are the ones who have done so much to damage minorities, Women, LGBTQ+ People, the environment, etc.  They simply don't care because their ideology and pose of Bill of Rights purity matters more to them than the lives and rights of People, the environment, and everything else their advocacy has damaged.  It's clear in this latest filing THAT THEY DON'T CARE FOR THE INTEGRITY OF THE RULE OF LAW, EVEN IN THE FACE OF A NEARLY SUCCESSFUL FASCIST PUTSCH AGAINST THE VERY CONSTITUTION THEY CLAIM TO REVERE.

That's how truly vile the "civil liberties" racket is.  Liberals should dump it and declare the truth, they're on the side of the oligarchs and plutocrats, which is no surprise because so many of them are oligarchs, themselves.

Natural Selection And The Golden Calf of Republican Fascism In All Its Vulgar Materialism - A Response

NOTE: First the short answer.  Mike Johnson is no more of a Christian than Donald Trump is and Donald Trump is a thorough Mammonist and ego maniac, he's the golden-calf of Republican-fascism.  The topic of evolution is a mere side-show.
CERTAINLY THOSE BEING MOWED DOWN BY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS IN THE UNITED STATES MOST DAYS, AMONG THOSE MIKE JOHNSON DEEMS EXPENDABLE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS

THE ACCUSATION that because I reject Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, that leads me to have something in common with the fascist in sheep's clothing, Mike Johnson, the unanimous choice of the Republican-fascist caucus of the House of Representatives to be Speaker of the House is absurd.   I have never in my life not accepted that evolution is the most rational explanation of the diversity of life on Earth as indicated in the fossil and geological record.  Later the study of genetics added enormously to that conclusion.  Those show that species evolve from earlier no longer extant species at a time later species weren't there.  As far as I'm concerned, that somewhat over-rated cultural holding is well seen as being a fact and no longer a theory.  Though I think its position in the culture is absurdly elevated due to its role in the ideological struggle between a position I reject, materialistic atheism and scientism on one hand and biblical fundamentalism, which I reject just as much.  I hold that much of the clap trap of conjecture and Just-so story telling around the topic of evolution is as absurd as biblical fundamentalism and 6 day creationism and no more scientific, even though much of that is held to be orthodox science and taught in universities around the world.

Having done what you haven't, read widely in the literature of evolution, I know that not only was Darwinism the origin of eugenics - as I proved in those many posts I have written on that topic - but that it is also not a particularly good scientific theory, based as it is in an ideological economic speculation that has little to no demonstration in physical observation or accurate measurement and which included a large component of self-interest among those who originated all of it.  That lack of observation and measurement means that scientific method can't be applied to theories about it.  On top of that, no human being has ever seen speciation occur which means science cannot actually study speciation, despite the claims to that effect.  The act of speciation has left no unambiguous record of how it happened of even that it occurred in the scanty fossil record.  All of my belief in that is a conjecture based on the evidence even as the evidence doesn't show that's what happened.   No one has even the scantiest knowledge of how it happened and may be happening right now - if science and its products don't kill off all of life before new species can evolve.  No one knows if it happens in one way as conventional Darwinists insist on, or in many ways which may mix and combine in who knows how many ways, no one knows what the actual bases on which it happens are or how large that range of bases is.

Darwin's theory was based not on science but on a particularly brutal and obviously self-interested theory of late 18th and early 19th century economics, that of the rather stupid and dishonest Thomas Malthus*, taken up by the aristocratic Charles Darwin and used to make up a story of how speciation is supposed to have happened based on the extremely scanty fossil evidence available to him, the often naive and perhaps as often wrong interpretation of physical observation of living organisms, a complete lack of knowledge of genetics or epigenetics or those most recent discoveries of molecular biology that old-timey biologists get in a lather about when more up to date scientists like Dennis Nobel and James Shapiro insist on talking about them.  On top of that Darwin chose as his great demonstration of natural selection the human practice of breeding animals and plants WHICH IS IN NO WAY NATURAL BUT ARTIFICIAL SELECTION AND WHICH HAS NEVER, ONCE, RESULTED IN SPECIATION IN WHICH THE OFFSPRING COMPRISE A NEW SPECIES.   There is no demonstrable connection between human, artificial selective breeding and culling and what happens in nature.

Those biologists I've greatly admired, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin and their close colleagues have rightly called the bases of what Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism,"  Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, "Just-so Stories" while ignoring that the mother of all Just-so Stories is natural selection, itself.  Even as both of them were conventional Darwinists of a less fundamentalist variety.  

When you look at the theory of natural selection with open eyes and a critical mind and no professional or ideological motives, the reason it was adopted in mid to late 19th and 20th century science probably had a lot more to do with the class which professional biologists belonged to or sought to join in their professional choice, their race and gender AND THEIR IDEOLOGICAL PREFERENCES AND CLASS ECONOMIC INTERESTS than it did the integrity of the theory as science.  You can add the interest that biologists and their allies had in pretending they had a universal theory to explain one of the great mysteries of life such as it was believed physics had and chemistry was developing, I will point out with far greater success, durability and integrity than biology has proved to have.  

Its retention in the post-war period is in every way a product of all of those, especially to promote materialist-atheist-scientism, even as science has moved far past that theory being held up as supreme.  I think its retention is entirely ideological and self-interested, at this point and I think it is a serious danger, not only to scientific progress but, as the "Darwinian economists" such as advised Trumpian-Republican and Swedish policy demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic , they still are getting people killed in large numbers.

In terms of what Darwin, his inner circle such as Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and such as W. R. Gregg claimed and were taken seriously on with often horrendous legal and political consequences, many a modern day Darwinist would have never been born if they'd had their way because their science claimed our ancestors were degenerate, either on a class basis or on a basis of their ethnicity or on their health.  I know some of mine were driven to the verge of death by Malthusian class policy and held to be degenerate, presented by Darwin as that in his books.  If one of my great-great-great grandmothers had died in the British death camps, the work house she was interned in, I wouldn't' be here to annoy you. Which would be a shame.  And mine were all Northern Europeans living in Britain and its occupied lands.  Entire races of humans were on their death lists.  We don't know if those who may have been born to those killed or forcibly sterilized in the name of Darwinian fitness as Darwin and those others advocated may have bought into the theory that marked them as fated to be biologically dysgenic and a danger to the human species as a whole, once they'd had a chance at education and entering into the profession of science.  We don't know if others who were shunted off into inferior educations on the later day applications of Darwinism may have, even though they didn't get cut off from the future in the same way, depriving Darwinism of many a true believer.  Many People of Color, Turks, Russian and Polish Jews, the Irish, the poor in general were all held by Darwin and mainstream Darwinism to have been biologically inferior and their removal from the human species desirable along with those whose only crimes were to be malnourished, ill-housed and sick.  I'm not exaggerating in that, read The Descent of Man and mainstream Darwinist science by those accepted to have constituted official science if you think I am.  

Mike Johnson is clearly a dishonest, pseudo-Christian, Republican-fascist and liar.  He is a white-collar anti-democrat who participated in the soft-handed side of the most serious putsch against American government in its history, one which attempted to put not only the former Confederate states under an anti-democratic government but the entire country.  His statements blaming mass gun murder on the teaching of evolution is entirely a product of that ideological struggle between materialist-atheism and his own brand of vulgar materialism, oddly coming out in the same place, in the end.  

That it is an irrational lie peddled in the same dishonesty as TV advertising and hate-talk radio is to absolutely be expected.  His voting record in the House is eugenic, Darwinist in its consequences just as that of the "white evangelicals" generally is.  Other than in mere words, it is in no way in opposition to the atheist materialism of Darwinism, it is just as Malthusian even if it doesn't care much about evolution -which has no practical utility that interests them - and so has no problem denying that EVOLUTION (as distinguished from natural selection) is the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, a diversity which he and his policy have every intention of sacrificing to the profits of the rich, the white, the male and the privileged, the very basis of Malthusianism and, so, Darwinism after it.  Johnson may not be so crude or impolitic, or scientific as to draw up explicit death lists, but he has them, CERTAINLY THOSE BEING MOWED DOWN BY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS IN THE UNITED STATES MOST DAYS, AMONG THOSE HE DEEMS EXPENDABLE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS.   His actions demonstrate that whereas his lying mouth doesn't say it.

While I find it somewhat interesting what archeologists and paleontologists dig up and, sometimes, their story-telling about that, am even conditionally convinced of some of it, I don't think the topic of evolution is really nearly as important as a good self-righteous, college-graduate is supposed to.  I don't think it is central to most of the biological science and much of the most important of that.  I don't think there's any particular virtue to be found in the topic and am skeptical of its practical utility.  

The claim that knowing we are a product of evolution makes People more humane to other living beings and appreciative of the diversity of nature and the environment is absurd.  That is best seen by those who are bound by that belief the most strongly.   Biologists are among the most brutal People I've ever encountered, certainly within academia. The hundreds of millions, probably billions of animals and plants sacrificed by professional "life" scientists in the most dubious of commercial testing, often pseudo-scientific scientific studies, the casual brutality of scientists who kill and often maim before killing sentient animals proves that Darwinism and even a more up-to-date and honest biological education doesn't make them more humane.  The recently demonstrated folly of believing that mammals are an effective and accurate model of human physiology and biology, sometimes leading to very misleading claims about the efficacy and safety of commercial products and industrial action may indicate that all of that killing and torturing of animals to have been as pseudo-scientific as anything in the annals of modern historical snark.  

I cannot recall, once, in their breezy talk about all of this killing, which they presented as an inevitable consequences of "the law of nature," that is the theory of natural selection, that they advocated as science NOT KILLING PEOPLE.   Darwin, once, after Frances Cobbe presented her essay pointing out the moral consequences of a belief in natural selection gave one double-speaking passage in regard to that in The Descent of Man, the rest of the book scientifically arguing against any such preservation of life and repeatedly arguing for the boon for the survivors that the deaths of those deemed inferior as solid science.  It's clear from the history of Darwinism in science and in public policy and law that no one took his disingenuous ass-covering remark seriously. 

The belief in evolution certainly didn't make Thomas Huxley more humane as he eagerly anticipated what he predited would be the genocidal extermination of American Black People by what he held were the superior white population, once emancipation supposedly eliminated their economic utility to their "superiors."  It didn't make Darwin more humane as he made similar claims about the melioristic effects of genocidal extermination of entire races around the world in The Descent of Man and their replacement by Northern White Europeans.  It didn't make perhaps Darwin's favorite supporting scientist, the German Ernst Haeckel any less inclined to call for the murder of a whole list of People he held to be both biologically inferior and dysgenic to the population as a whole. As I mentioned Stephen Jay Gould rightly called his published and widely influential science, proto-Nazi.  Nazi racial, social and military theory was entirely based on a Darwinian view of evolution. 

Darwinism has led to a situation in the humanities in which the philosophical specialty of "ethics" has become a contest in drawing up lists of who it's OK to kill or let die of neglect.  That is humanism as practiced by those among such humanists who are conventional Darwinist evolutionists.  In that they are recapitulating the work of Haeckel,  Galton, Huxley, Pearson,  and others in a continuous list of names that gets you right up into those of the Nazi scientific establishment. I've brought that list right up to today in many posts, names of living credentialed scientists who are quoted by American and British right-wing scribblers and politicians to support their brutal policy choices and as published in mainstream magazines.  As noted in many of those posts, including the one I reposted the other day, natural selection, Darwinism, identifies DEATH as a supreme engine of human progress, whether by neglect or by outright murder.   That the enormous expansion of the acceptance of evolution led to the scientific field** of eugenics WHICH IS ALWAYS PRESENTED AS A HUMAN BENEFIT FOR THE SURVIVORS OF THE HURD CULLING! is certainly due to the theory of natural selection which still dominates the science of biology and every other field that attached itself to it.  

That wasn't inevitable, it is quite possible that a theory of evolution not based in a melioristic and brutal Malthusian economic ranking of differential financial value may not have produced eugenics.  Though I doubt that such a theory would have been so quickly accepted by the class of men who ruled science, those who accepted Darwinism.  Some such theories, today, are most stridently resisted by today's Darwinists.   The overarching framing of evolution and the holding that all life is related certainly didn't produce a more humane and moral view of life, not even human life.  But, bypassing the topic of biological evolution,  the Malthusianism, the capitalism, the wealthy class basis of Republican-fascism, even when it falsely claims that it is consonant with Christianity - WHICH IT CERTAINLY IS NOT - is no better.  They having the same power now that eugenicists had before, they are far more of a danger today.  That is built on the indigenous form of American fascism, white supremacy which Thomas Huxley believed was an expression of Darwinian biological superiority.   They are merely a different branch of the same amoral and cultural evolution that materialist-atheism is, Darwinism being a major part of that in the most recent part of the modern period.  The fact that species evolve did absolutely nothing to make that better, you need far more than science to lead you to something better than that. Science is incapable of that just as economics and secular legalism are.

Mike Johnson is no more of a Christian than Donald Trump is and Donald Trump is a thorough Mammonist and ego maniac. Both believe entirely in the economic and financial ranking of lives instead of Gospel equality.  Jesus Christ said it, you cannot serve both God and Mammon.  Despite what he claims, Mike Johnson serves Mammon.  Every member of the House Republican Caucus does, their voting record proves it, their Christianity is a fraud right down to the last one.  I believe the Gospel of Jesus and take the Epistles and Acts seriously.  That results in the most radical thing there is, no materialistic ideological category can come close and the vulgar materialism of a Mike Johnson doesn't even try to.  I'm sure he would hold it is heretical and, if he could, he would violently suppress it.  

* Decades before Darwin used Malthus to invent natural selection the radical English democrat William Cobbett pointed out that Malthus  advocating that the poor be left to starve away under "the law of nature" instead of helped proved how stupid he was because if the "law of nature" instead of the artificial laws of England and Britain ruled the poor would have dispossessed the British wealthy class of their wealth in a matter of hours and the entire basis of Malthus's economics would be obliterated.  That has always been an underlying fear of those with wealth going back to when Pharaoh was having his nightmares at the end of Genesis, it is the fear of those with wealth or the fantasy they will become wealthy which leads to all of the degrees of gangster rule as opposed to egalitarian democracy in which all are truly equal.  

** Science is whatever scientists of any time accept as science.  The inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton was certainly one of the most eminent scientists of his time and the innovator of many fields still embedded into science today.  Eugenics is still promoted within science, though not generally admitted to be that.  It's as current in science as 6-day creationism is in religion, though with far more dangerous effects.   If religion is answerable for bad religion - as it certainly does answer for it, I doubt there is more exigent criticism of biblical fundamentalism than within religion - then science can't get off the hook for bad science.  Both are human activities founded in the choices that People make, science claims for itself a heightened ability to discern the truth from falsity, yet scientists and those who will claim, for themselves, a heightened "public understanding of science" insist that it be exempted from even that level of internal responsibility.  The often naive faith we outsiders have in science, the power given to it because it is sometimes efficacious and quite profitable makes it far more dangerous than any religion.  I have never seen a credentialed scientist kicked out of science for pushing climate-change denial for pay any more than its weaponeers and promoters of white supremacy have been.  Science is a mess as "religion" falsely considered as a coherent category is a mess.  Only science is pretended to be a unified whole as religion is mocked for its enormous diversity.  A lot of that is due to the dishonesty of academic credentialing, which is a different but related topic.  Education is a total mess, too.  Elite universities are really fucked up.

Errata

I NOTICED that I'd inverted the first two names of Michael Sean Winters in what I posted yesterday when I re-read it at home last night, but I don't have internet at home, anymore.   I'd tell my old acquaintance Sean Michaels it was his fault but he's long gone.   I should start calling him Michael Winters when I write about him.  

Other flaws in my writing are generally incomplete edits to change sentence structure, others because spell-check doesn't have much of a vocabulary.  

Other than that I am shameless about my writing, I don't even feel ashamed of being shameless about it.

My More Measured Response - It's Long

I HAVE SAID in the past that I like Michael Sean Winters and respect his thinking so I wanted to take some time to respond to his October 27th article.  I don't have time to go through every part of it so I'll go to what I think is the heart of his argument which he starts by saying:

At Politico Magazine, Evan Mandery penned an interesting profile of Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The organization is devoted to the promotion of civil libertarianism. Catholics cannot embrace libertarianism of any kind but we can, perhaps, extend good wishes to the civil libertarians in this moment of time.

Of course many will be surprised to find out that according to Catholic doctrine libertarianism is problematic, to say the least.  My objection to it is not at all based on Catholic doctrine but is due to my conviction that equality is an absolute requirement, a just and legitimate foundation of any legitimate government.  I think in practical terms equality is an nonnegotiable foundation of any legitimate government.  Equality under the law, equality under rules and practices, equality for the absolutes of material and spiritual right to live a decent, safe, secure life.  Libertarianism puts any number of "liberties" over that and has no problem with the use of liberties allowed to crush PEOPLE, their rights, their lives, putting those liberties over any morality that supports equality, democracy and a decent normal life for those either targeted by libertarians or those who benefit from their ideology, primarily those who are privileged, the wealthy, the white, the male, the straight, the glib and telegenic.  

I HAD BETTER SPECIFY THAT THAT EQUALITY IS  EQUALITY FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR ABSTRACTIONS, NOT FOR IDEAS, NOT FOR WORDS.  I will never entertain the idea that rights, including a right to equality inheres to anything but natural living beings.   People are natural beings to whom rights can inhere, abstractions, ideas and words are not natural beings. It is quite possible to discern that those to not only be inferior to other ideas, while many ideas are good, many are innocuous and many absolutely true, others can be everything from suspected of to being known to be to be absolutely known to be dangerous to the rights of People and animals and other living beings.  Those ideas can often be suppressed with not only no danger but with the results that dangers are prevented.  No one in the world would have been harmed if Trumps lunatic advocacy of using horse wormer  to treat Covid-19 had been absolutely suppressed.  Many may have lived if that had happened, no one would have died because it was.

He continues:

The question remains: Are Lukianoff's principles right? The answer remains "no" and the reasons are in the profile. Civil libertarianism is a good thing, until it becomes an ideology, an absolute. In Lukianoff's hands, it fits the definition of heresy attributed to Lord Acton: a truth run amok.

How is it good? Free speech is a necessary lifeblood of democracy.

I can think of any number of "lifebloods" of democracy that come before this inspecific, abstracted even disembodied notion of "free speech."  One of those is certainly relevant to the claim, the freedom to tell the truth, which is the actual lifeblood of democracy.  There is a right to tell the truth, which is a good, there is no right to lie, lies being everything from innocuously wrong to fatally wrong and perhaps most often told for creating harm.  I can also note that many things like eating, drinking, breathing, shelter, safety, are more necessary to democracy than any word or idea.  Yet none of those are guaranteed by "civil liberties" or the United States Constitution, for that matter.

Without the truth being the crucial aspect of "free speech" free speech becomes the opposite of a lifeblood of democracy, it becomes a sure and fatal poison to democracy.  That is true of the only form of democracy with complete legitimacy, egalitarian democracy.  The vote of those who have been successfully lied to is certainly not any kind of a guarantee to that, those who voted for Trump, those who voted in dictators and despots who have then ended any elections and immediately abridged the rights of those who oppose them, most of all the right of anyone to tell truths that they want to suppress.  Those who toe the party line of the worst dictators are entirely free to speak or write or publish that, true or false makes no difference.  Such are the uses of "free speech" when the libertarian definition of that bears its full crop of fruit.  

I do thank Michael Sean Winters for so tidily putting it, though, "Civil libertarianism is a good thing, until it becomes an ideology, an absolute,"  which is a useful point of departure.  More useful than anything I've ever heard from any "civil libertarian."  

I have yet to read or hear libertarianism which is not an ideology, an absolute, including civil libertarianism.  The "civil liberties" industry, the ACLU, various free lance "civil liberties" lawyers - such as Ephraim London who,  pro-bono,  went after Mary McCarthy when she told the inconvenient truth about that icon of civil libertarian "free speech" Lillian Hellman, that she was a flagrant liar and fabulist.   That London's client spent decades idolizing Stalin and the Soviet Union as they not only abolished truth telling and even quite innocuous speech and artistic expression but murdered countless truth tellers and writers and artists doesn't seem to have much bothered the civil liberties lawyer.  Considering that and the fact she was filthy rich, unlike McCarthy, you'd have thought he'd have charged her. That is typical of "civil liberties" lawyers, as I've recently pointed out.  They seldom if ever intend to be the ones who pay the cost of their clients privilege to target other People.  They are generally like the named men in Winter's articles,  affluent, straight, white men who have white collar professions, mostly the product of elite educations supported by others fitting those descriptions and whatever dupes - such as me, who stupidly and dutifully sent my annual donation to the ACLU once was - who fall for their PR.

I have come to truly despise those who make "civil liberties" their professional identity as either a lawyer or a member of the scribbling class or media babbeler.  I have never looked far into the actual life or professional activities and associations of one which doesn't mark them as an accomplished hypocrite.  Almost always members of the privileged class who are seldom going to be targeted for destruction by their clients or those on whose behalf they write amicus briefs.

I'll list those in the article:

Evan Mandery- Harvard College, Law School
Greg Lukianoff - American University, Stanford Law Scholl
Jonathan Haidt - Pennsylvania University, Yale
Nicholas Christakis - Pennsylvania University, Harvard, Harvard Medical
Ron DeSantis - Yale, Harvard Law
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr - Harvard University 

Certainly I'm not the only one noticing a pattern, here.  The one out, according to Winters would be DeSantis, only I'd note that his policy as governor and would be president oddly ends up somewhere not that far from where the reality of what the "civil liberties" industry gets us, in the end.  If lies and false witness, the promotion of racism and bigotry were not allowed to flourish on the airwaves, on the cabloids, on hate-talk radio and the internet, Ron DeSantis would probably have a legal career such as the on Alina Habba did before Trump hired her.   It is certainly the same as that which so many in the "civil liberties" industry represent in court, as I mentioned the ACLU proudly announcing their amicus brief in favor of Trump practicing witness intimidation, intimidation of prosecutors and trial judges.   The Nazis, the white supremacists, etc.  Who are politically ascendant in no small part to their "free press" advocacy.

Anyone who calls themselves a liberal should think fondly on the memory of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. who did so much to shape our understanding of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.

I've gone into detail at how bizarre it is for any traditional American style liberal to hold Holmes jr. in that regard because he was a bitter, cynical opponent of much of what liberalism must champion for it to be liberalism.  He believed in survival of the fittest and it showed in his work, like his father before him he .  He was a convinced Darwinist, what most polite college credentialed People would call a "social-Darwinist" though, unlike them, Holmes had read Darwin and his followers and knew that "social Darwinism" is, in fact, identical to the ideological scientific theory of natural selection.  He was bitterly cynical about democracy and only late in his life modified his thinking in reaction to the Great Depression and the rise of European fascism and Nazism.  Unfortunately it came after he wrote the decision legalizing forced eugenics sterilization which he privately expressed deepest satisfaction in having done. And he never really much did atone for that.  I'll point out, again, that the Nazis, among others, were deeply impressed with and influenced by the eugenics that Holmes decision legalized in the United States.  

Since it figures so much in the article and the whiny advocacy of "civil liberties" by these guys, I think the reason that college campuses have become the locus of so much reaction against professor or student expressions of racism, bigotry, sexism, etc. is that those who go there often worked very hard to get there, those who are not affluent, straight, white men often having to work far harder than those who are.  They pay or borrow a lot of money to go there to get an education or, actually, the credentials that colleges and universities hold a monopoly on giving them, often their best hopes for something like a leg up, only knowing that those with privilege already have more than two legs up.*  

Landing at a college or university with all of that being the case, they then find themselves and those like them and those who they know they're in the same boat with being targeted in ways that make their lives on campus and during their college years far harder, their living conditions sometimes more frightening or upsetting than what they knew before.  The university or college they are paying and going into debt for not helping them is certainly more than just a "civil liberties" thing.  It is a danger to their future.  I wonder if they had more legal and political clout, you can read that "money," if they could not get what happened to them there made into a breach of contract.  Maybe they could find a lawyer who would take the case, though they'd certainly find the elite "civil liberties" lawyers filing a brief as to why they should be coerced into dropping out of college.   Untold martyrs to "civil liberties."  Unlike the lawyers and scribblers who support that result, in the end.

I think what these white men and their allies have a beef with is that Black People, other People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ People are in the hallowed halls of the conferring of credentials with all the rights and privileges those afford being offered to them and the experience of those People, their lives lead to them knowing that the old slogans of libertarian ideology, the truncated language of "civil liberties" the facile interpretation of "free speech" aren't sufficient in the fight for equality and real democracy.  I hear some of them and I distinctly sense that what they don't like is that those people are going to the same places they went.  

The experience of the Trump era in which so many so often bemoaned the basis of Trumpian fascism, lies, the devaluation of the truth, the attack on the concept of truth, itself, forces the question of why, since we all know lies are such a danger to democracy, why lies are allowed to flourish under the slogans "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".  That's hardly news, the role of lies in the rise of dictators throughout history has long been noted.  I doubt anyone could ever find the first expression of the experienced and noted danger of lies in world literature.  It is certainly there in the Torah, it is expressed in Scriptures and other writings from around the world from the earliest times.  

You have to be as pretend stupid as a civil liberties lawyer or a judge or "justice" to pretend to not know that lies are dangerous, in no small way dangerous to People and to equality and, yes, to democracy.**

That was hardly a novel concept to those who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, yet they stupidly neglected to make that clear in what they wrote and what got adopted.  Of course, since most of them were slave holders they can hardly have been suspected of much minding if false witness was spread about those they never intended to allow free-speech or free-press or any of the other things they wrote into the Constitution.  They certainly didn't intend the slaves to have "the right to bear arms."  They certainly didn't allow them any of the other civil liberties they wrote into the Bill of Rights.  That's a truth you'll get told to shut up if you say it.  

We have reached the end of that, it's clear the fascists among us, the white supremacists, the billionaire and millionaire weaponizers of "civil liberties" and the judges and "justices" who have no liking for equal or democracy - the attacks on Voting rights and Bush v Gore prove they are a majority on the Renquist and Roberts Courts - this can't go on in such lofty, Ivy-League law school inspecificity.  

We will either drastically change the current notions of "civil liberities," "free-speech" "free press" or we will lose them.  At the very least the frequently heard "civil liberties" lawyer slogan that someone "has a right to lie" has to be definitively suppressed.

Winters completed the thought left off above with this statement.

Keeping government out of the regulation of ideas is as essential to the functioning of a democracy as counting the ballots fairly.

Which is nonsense because while a fair vote count is always an essential act in a democracy there are numerous ideas that could be absolutely suppressed or abolished with absolutely no harm to the functioning of a democracy, anti-democratic ideas, for a start.  

The idea that the promotion of Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism, fascism, the indigenous American form of that white supremacy are not, actually, a danger to democracy instead of essential to it is sheer lunacy.  Winters gets close to that with this observation:

One of the deeper problems with the civil libertarianism Lukianoff promotes is its abstractness. It may be well suited to producing resilient young people, capable of arguing in ways that develop their ideas. But how do the moral claims of the common good manifest themselves in all this? For example, most liberals applauded the ACLU when it defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. But what if they wanted to march in Stuttgart, Germany? Does the state there have the right to restrict speech given the uniquely horrific history of antisemitism in that country? .

Well, Native Americans, Black People, Women, LGBTQ+ People here have been murdered and oppressed, enslaved, etc. here.  Women are murdered every day because they are Women, Trans Women of Color have one of the highest murder rates in the United States.  Black People and Native Americans are murdered on account of their race, often with complete impunity, in our past, AND TODAY.  White supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the incumbent Speaker of the House make no secret of their intentions to continue and relive worse times for all of use, my fellow LGBTQ+ People and our fellow People in all of those other targeted groups that the "civil libertarians" want to always wear a target so their clients can always have a chance to do it again.  It is the open intention of the Republican-fascist party and a reality in many of the states in the country right now.   I have absolutely no intention of targeting the lives of them in the same way that they have every intention of targeting me.  Certainly my advocacy for equality of People, though not necessarily their words and ideas, is different from someone who wants to kill me.  If civil libertarians can't tell the difference they're too stupid take seriously on any of this.

None of this is a surprise to those who have been successfully targeted by one or more of those, the history of Black People in the United States is untellable without noting their lives living under white supremacy, the same for Native Americans.  As we have found in the long backlash against the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, etc. that form of fascism, targeting those without white skin is not in some past but is a reality today.  That People of Color on campus might see things differently from those white guys named in Winter's article is hardly to be wondered at, they know a reality that white people might know abstractly though it's clear that the "civil libertarians" don't really mind it, THAT THEY HAVE MORE CARE FOR THE "RIGHTS" OF WORDS THAN PEOPLE IS WHAT WOULD BE EXPECTED FROM THOSE SO PRIVILEGED.

The question such bleating civil libertarians always as is "But who is to decide?" the answer to that is certainly not those who benefit from the inequality of privilege, "civil liberties" has come to be a guarantee of every step forward being followed by some Supreme Court or lower court sending those targeted by such "speech" back to where they started from, if not somewhere worse.  Like the Taney Court in Dred Scott, like Joseph Story in Prigg v Pennsylvania, the tender regards for "rights" of those with privilege generally comes with a devastating loss of rights of the most basic kind.  The answer to that is we have to make those decisions and choices because to not make them is to allow the worst the liberty to make the worst happen, which is what they want to do.  

*  I hate to break it to anyone but getting a degree from even an elite university is not a sign of being educated, if you want an education that's a life-long job and, sorry, it's up to you to get it for yourself.  Given the vile characters that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. are turning out and into our media and government, I've developed a very strong skepticism for those who have a degree from those preservers and bestowers of privilege, a law degree from their law schools more so than a BA or BS from their undergraduate sides.   "Civil liberties" lawyers from them as much or even more so as much as those who tried to overturn the 2020 election for Trump.  The stink from them should never get off of those institutions.  They should be leveled by taxing their obscene endowments, the money collected given to educational institutions and scholarship programs that lift those targeted by the product of the elite diploma mills.

** In the first version of this, before I cooled down a bit, I noted that Judge Judy is more honest about knowing bullshit for bullshit than any "civil liberties" lawyer or so many judges and many "justices" are.   Their professional poise of stupidly not seeing plain truth and even fact is disgusting.  I have an absolute conviction that stuff started as a way for them letting off those they wanted to let off, the privileged, the rich, those they knew or were related to.  From there that practice was made precedent and it is ubiquitous in the fact that the law is often not only an ass, it is an asshole.

Schools Still Shut And Locked Down Here, Just Smell The Civil Liberty!

I WAS GOING to answer the "civil liberties" bullshit I got but right now I'm too angry to.  Here's something one of the networks posted about the mass murderer in my state:

The suspect appears to have "interacted with conspiratorial content" online, information provided to law enforcement shows. Topics he engaged with included but were not limited to: concerns about a financial crisis/stock market, LGBTQ+ issues, gun rights and commentary about Democratic public officials, including President Joe Biden.

It took that as much as it did the guns, neither of which is going to be addressed thanks to, you know, "civil liberties." 

The civil liberties industry hacks can all fuck off as they preen in their safe, white-collar milieu.  From The ACLU to those who start other schemes to get money from suckers and those who idiotically believe them to be a force for good.   Even someone who knows that they're morally indefensible, in a very real sense. 

I'll probably be writing a response to the piece at the last link but I'm too angry right now.

 

the evidence shows what it shows and is neither ambiguous nor is it going to go away

NOTE:  I got yet another in the endless challenge over what I recently pointed out about Darwin's direct connection to eugenics and the eugenics of Nazism.  As I mentioned it wasn't me who was first to make that connection, it was a series of Darwinists starting with the inventor of eugenics, his cousin Francis Galton,  citing Darwin's glowing approval of Galton's first works in eugenics.  The link is to one of the first things I ever did here, an answer to a challenge to prove that eugenics was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.   That evidence, given both from Galton's explicit statement that On the Origin of Species was his inspiration to invent eugenics has to stand as absolute proof.  That he quoted Darwin's enthusiastic endorsement of his earliest eugenics publications and Darwin cited it as reliable science, himself, makes anyone denying that link a liar at worst, too ignorant to be spouting the common received lies exonerating Darwin, not really any better than a liar.  Many such liars have flourished in academia and the popular understanding of science since the end of WWII.

The evidence tying natural selection to Nazi eugenics and their genocides only begins with the German scientist Ernst Haeckel whose proto-Nazi (I endorse Stephen J. Gould's statement of that word) race theories explicitly developed out of the same theory Galton used to invent eugenics, natural selection.   Darwin's glowing citation and praise of their work in supporting his theory of natural selection, the very early eugenic articles and book of Galton and Haeckel's proto-Nazi speculations in The History of Creation including his endorsement of murder in Darwin's second major work on natural selection, The Descent of Man has been there for anyone wanting to deny those links right in that book and in many of the rest of the literature from Darwin and his most intimate inner circle.

As you can see from the links, I've proved that connection beyond any rational doubt.  I can hardly be said to have been the first to make those links, Charles Darwin did that all by himself.

 As I pointed out recently a later figure of unimpeachable  authority to do the same, repeatedly, over decades was Charles Darwin's son Leonard Darwin, only one of the, I believe, four eugenicist Darwin sons, I'm not sure how many of his daughters or grandchildren or other Darwin's did, though I know his grandson Charles Galton Darwin was still doing it after WWII and in the period when eugenics went underground.  

I will point out that there is no one in the post WWII period who had or has the credibility of those figures I cited and quoted in the links above, including Leonard Darwin, including Charles Darwin, himself to tie him with eugenics and there is no one who can refute what the Nazis said, themselves and the Nazis of today.   I'd give more links but you can look for The Daily Stormer and William Luther Pierce in my archives.  I do warn you to make sure your anti-virus filters are at full power before you go doing the kind of research I did back when I researched that.   What you see there will disgust you unless you are morally depraved.   I've written scores of posts on these subjects and I never did so without citing primary documentation except when dealing with Wilhelm Schallmeyer because his German was so difficult to read.  

But I'm not going to go over what I've already done again so I'm going to do something I haven't done in years, repost an answer I gave those questions in 2015:

Answer To A Challenge

I could go on and on, answering the non-evidenced and ignorant retorts, refusing to look at the evidence and documentation that ties Darwin's natural selection to eugenics in both English speaking countries and Germany and the ties of the active eugenics programs of the United States directly to the Nazi eugenic-mass murders, every single time I have looked into this the number of direct, primary documents in my notes grows larger.  Virtually every scientific eugenicist I've ever read directly ties their eugenics to their reading of The Origin of Species and, even more so, The Descent of Man.  I would, of course, include the proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckel* to that list, the man named by Darwin and his closest associates such as Thomas Huxley and his son Francis Darwin as the foremost champion of Charles Darwin's work in Germany or, in fact, on the continent of Europe.

But this isn't about what the evidence shows and what it shows is neither ambiguous nor is it going to go away.  Eventually it is going to have to be faced by those who deny it now.   That is the thing about primary evidence, in the words of the principles, it doesn't go away, it can't be overcome except through lying and the lies are always vulnerable to people reading that primary documentation.

This article by the expert on these issues, Edwin Black, makes an irrefutable case that the Nazis learned a lot of what they did from Americans, including such ideas as murdering "undesirables" in gas chambers,

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." "Applied Eugenics" also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Applied Eugenics was unambiguous as to where the idea of eugenics came from,

The science of eugenics is the natural result of the spread and acceptance of organic evolution, following the publication of Darwin's work on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. It took a generation for his ideas to win the day; but then they revolutionized the intellectual life of the civilized world. Man came to realize that the course of nature is regular; that the observed sequences of events can be described in formulas which are called natural laws; he learned that he could achieve great results in plant and animal breeding by working in harmony with these laws. Then the question logically arose, "Is not man himself subject to these same laws?[Pg 148] Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?"

The evolutionist* answered both these questions affirmatively. However great may be the superiority of his mind, man is first of all an animal, subject to the natural laws that govern other animals. He can learn to comply with these laws; he can, therefore, take an active share in furthering the process of evolution toward a higher life.

... It is really on Darwin's work that the modern science of eugenics is based, and it owes its beginning to Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.

Or that the mechanism of selection was, in fact, death.

The lethal factor is the one which Darwin himself most emphasized. Obviously a race will be steadily improved, if the worst stock in it is cut off before it has a chance to reproduce, and if the best stock survives to perpetuate its kind. "This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection, or the survival of the fittest," Darwin wrote; and he went on to show that the principal checks on increase were overcrowding, the difficulty of obtaining food, destruction by enemies, and the lethal effects of climate. These causes may be conveniently divided as in the above diagram, into sustentative and non-sustentative. The sustentative factor has acquired particular prominence in the human species, since Malthus wrote his essay on population—that essay which both Darwin and Wallace confess was the starting point of their discovery of natural selection.

Paul Popenoe:  Applied Eugenics

So, there, the link from Darwin to the proposal to improve the human species through mass gassing of those considered undesirable, all in the person of Paul Popenoe, one of the foremost and respected of the American eugenicists, who, by the way, was quoted by Baur, Lenz and Fischer in the book Hitler was reading while he was spewing Mein Kampf.   The Americans (not to mention British eugenicists) were openly talking about the possible benefits of Darwinian murder of undesirables in gas chambers more than two decades before the Germans built the first of those.  The first of which, by the way, was not used to murder Jews, Roma, Pols and others on the basis of ethnicity but it was at Hadamar Hospital, constructed to murder people who were disabled, many of them Germans, the transports to it were on special buses, not trains, but the victims were just as murdered before their bodies were cremated at the crematorium constructed as part of that mass murder program.  It was certainly a small scale model of what the Nazis would later construct, in which they gassed and burned millions of Jews, Poles, Roma, members of religious minorities, political opponents, etc.

As I said, every time I look at the words of eugenicists, whenever they talk about what inspired their eugenic thinking, they inevitably mention the writings of Charles Darwin.   Another originator of an idea the Nazis made their own mentioned by Black in the article was the eminent American scientist David Starr Jordan.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

And Jordan, as well, was explicit about the role that Charles Darwin played in all of his thinking as a biologist.

The law of descent, with change through “natural selection,” brings into organic connection a host of facts hitherto isolated.  Each one considered by itself would be without meaning or explanation.  The essential argument in favor of Darwinism is that it brings all biological facts into unison from whatever field of investigation these facts may be derived.  However much evolutionists have at times seemed to drift away from Darwin's conclusions, it is always the most accurate research and the sanest thought which comes nearest the opinions set forth in the Origin of Species.  The body of facts has grown enormously year by year, but the conclusions we must accept are substantially those laid down by Darwin himself.

David Starr Jordan:  Footnotes to Evolution

There is no possibility in mistaking the source of Jordan's inspiration whenever he talked as a biologist and a eugenicist.

Considering all of this pre-Nazi eugenics by founding presidents of universities like Jordan, whose work informed the millionaires and great philanthropic institutions who were up to their necks in promoting eugenics in pre-Nazi Germany and who funded the very institutions which provided the scientific justifications and methods to the Nazis, even employing the pioneer in using people in death camps for medical experiments and scientific research,  Eugen Fischer, reminds me of another quote, one from the survivor of the death camps and the Nazi mass murders,  Viktor Frankl

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him.  When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz.  The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment – or as the Nazi liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.”  I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.  


Viktor E. Frankl:  The Doctor and the Soul

Which, in turn, reminds me of that foremost of all Darwinists in Germany up to the very year the Nazi party formed, 1919,  Ernst Haeckel

By the Theory of Descent we are for the first time enabled to conceive of the unity of nature in such a manner that a mechanico-causal explanation of even the most intricate organic phenomena, for example, the origin and structure of the organs of sense, is no more difficult (in a general way) than is the mechanical explanation of any physical process; as, for example, earthquakes, the courses of the wind, or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the extremely important conviction that all natural bodies which are known to us are equally animated, that the distinction which has been made between animate and inanimate bodies does not exist. When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propagation of animals or the activity of their senses, than the perception or the formation of thought in man. This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.

Ernst Haeckel:  Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte  vol. 1 (translated by Ray Lankster)


*  [Haeckel's] evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a “just” state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his grave words about objective science—all contributed to the rise of Nazism,

Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny