As always, Stalker Geezer is lying when he now accuses me of making "a vile attack" against his now ailing girlfriend.
Not that I think his baby blue buddies care but here's what happened.
A few years back, after S.G. had attacked something I wrote against the porn-prostitution industry and the hypocrisy of the pseudo-liberals who champion the "rights" of pornographers to destroy people, I asked him the same question I ask all such frauds, if they think porn is so great, would they be OK with their family, their children, their parents, their siblings, their spouse - or since I knew he was unmarried, HIS GIRLFRIEND - to do what happens in porn, be penetrated in whatever way, to do whatever act that porn directors and producers order the people who appear in porn to do.
I make that challenge to point out what hypocrites they are because, no, they would never want their children, parents, spouses or girlfriends to have to be penetrated vaginally, anally, orally by another man or several men who had, similarly and on orders of porn producers, directors and, um.... well, "writers" to penetrate other similarly used women, children and men. I may have listed some of the many vile and disgusting things that the porn that S.G. championed forced people to do, things that exposed them to infection, that degraded them, that tortured and damaged them in my question. He's the one who's OK with those things being done to anyone, not me.
I do recall that he lied and said it would be OK with him if HIS GIRLFRIEND did those things because he couldn't deny her a career in "show biz". I didn't believe it for a second and I'm sure I told him he was lying at the time.
That, now, he's saying that what he claims to be totally OK with happening to other people, when proposed as a possibility for someone he loves, someone he cares about is a "vile attack" on HIS girlfriend (as she recuperates from surgery) only proves my point about such supporters of porn-prostitution. It's entirely OK as long as it's someone else's child, parent, sibling, spouse or girlfriend who is abused, infected, damaged and destroyed by porn. And, yes, folks, in the perverted twisting of the word in the past century, that double standard is now know as "liberalism".
Such "liberalism" is what the secular left now almost uniformly consists of, it is a kind of neo-liberalism that has had its most notable success in discrediting real liberalism which would never be anything but entirely against that kind of violation of the rights and dignity of other people and the class of people who are destroyed by porn and prostitution. That neo-liberalism will always end up reinforcing inequality as is being discovered as young women and girls are expected by boys brought up on the reinforcement of their privilege and entitlement to do what they see done to women in porn. The same can be said about men and boys under the domination of the inequality and self-hatred reinforced by gay porn. That happens whenever you put commercial privileges, including those of the media, over the equal rights owned by every person.
Update: Duncan Black has knowingly published vicious lies about me almost daily for years, I am entirely within my rights to consider him an asshole as well as good percentage of his current regulars. I think his blog's useful days were over about a decade ago and apparently most of those who used to regularly comment there don't think it's worth bothering with regularly or at all, today. He's hardly even going through the motions these days except to ask people for money as he does nothing. He's a grifter with a PhD from an Ivy League school.
Update 2: And Simps does it again at Duncan's blog, demonstrating the truth of what I said about him and Eschaton. I think the left would be a little bit better off if Duncan found a job and stopped going through the motions.
Update 3: "oldest joke in the world" a. you should stop being so fixated on yourself, b. figures you'd rely on repeating the oldest joke in the world instead of coming up with something original, c. the joke is in your hand.
Monday, April 18, 2016
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Hate Mail - The Insouciant Laughter of The Insouciant
Any Subject Can Be Funny? Ha! I don't think Duncan has found people making fun of him and his blog is especially funny. Nor those who have noted that he is hardly a member of the underclass. He doesn't even find it funny when someone makes fun of his sense in comedy. I've seen him get testy when someone did that. He banned me when I mocked his affection for the stupid, vulgar piece of crap, The Aristocrats. I've never known a man who had jokes made about those things in his life and about his body that he's touchy about think that was funny, even as other people around them were weeping with laughter. I've never known a man who was going through mid-life crisis find that to be an especially funny topic.
I think what he means is that people on top making fun of people beneath them can have no bottom beneath which the ones on top will think it's not funny anymore. Straight, white, affluent men have the most to laugh about, I guess. I would guess there are lots of topics women wouldn't find funny, the murder of Kitty Genovese comes to mind. I wonder what the author Duncan's favorite movie, Penn Jillette, would do with that topic. I wonder if it's ever figured in a rendition of "The Aristocrats".
It depends on who you are and where you find yourself, if you're lacking in sympathetic imagination to that extent. I don't think the inmates of the death camps would have found Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler particularly funny. I guess any who didn't would be accused of lacking a sense of humor. Really, why is that any more funny than the most offensive movie since Birth of a Nation, Life Is Beautiful? Loved Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in that movie, hated the Springtime for Hitler part of it.
Update: Message to my stalker: I Don't Practice Nazi Thinking, You Do
I really don't know a word for it but there should be a name for the frequently used tactic of argument by assholes that begins in distorting what someone said and replacing it with something that they never said. I never said what Jews should find offensive, I said that I doubted that inmates of DEATH CAMPS would have found Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler sequences to be funny. Of course, to start with, I wasn't telling anyone what they should find funny and, second, many millions of people murdered or slated to be murdered by the Nazis were not Jews. I don't think any victims of the Nazis were more significant than any others, they are all equal. We've been through that before, to rank the victims of the Nazis in terms of their worthiness of consideration is to put into practice the same thinking that led the Nazis to kill people for their ethnic identity, their status of disability or for their religious beliefs. I don't practice Nazi thinking, you do.
You're just lying about the rest of it too. I haven't looked but I imagine you repeated that on Duncan's Dunces as you've been doing for the past four years. I imagine Duncan thinks that's hilarious, for which you can tell him to bite me.
Update 2: Since I will not publish any more comments by you I have to tell people that your comment is another in the long line of examples of what I said needed a name in my last update. I didn't make any claims about, as you put it, "the relatives of those death camp inmates". Nor do I particularly care about their reactions if they were as you claim. I think if they found Springtime For Hitler to be hilarious they couldn't have thought very hard about the suffering of their relatives and the Nazis creed that there is an ethnic hierarchy, which you share which was the reason that they suffered and in so many millions of cases died. If you are referring to yourself, born well after the war, I wouldn't accuse you of an act of sympathetic imagination, as a self-centered idiot, you aren't capable of either sympathy or imagination.
I don't think it's anything to laugh about or to make light of, if making fun of it were effective in preventing it it would never have happened as the Nazis were mocked and ridiculed from the start of their organizing and it did nothing to prevent any of it. We've been through that, as well. Mel Brooks has been a good comic actor, writer and movie maker, though one who so often went for the easy laugh, that one thing he did was offensive. If he had been making movies before the war, they would have done nothing, whatsoever, to prevent the Nazis doing anything they did.
That power attributed to comedy and even satire is a lie, neither of them have nearly that much power. Their proven power would tend more to strengthen the malign aspects of life, as we have seen in the period since Andrew Dice Clay and others revived the worst in misogynistic, racist, etc. "humor," with the full approval of the community of comedians. Comedians, with rare exceptions, are all about going for the easy laugh. The Nazis, the Klan, fascists, etc. are fond of that kind of "humor". And so are you as a fan of Penn Jillette's movie which Duncan loved so much which so often features those things. And as Dorothy Parker pointed out, the kind of stuff that Mel Brooks does isn't satire, it's a form of light topical humor that doesn't go deep enough to be satire. You couldn't handle satire, it requires thought to experience.
Update 3: If you're auditioning for a job as my copy editor, forget it, my first requirement would be that anyone getting that job would not be an habitual liar and pathological stalker.
I think what he means is that people on top making fun of people beneath them can have no bottom beneath which the ones on top will think it's not funny anymore. Straight, white, affluent men have the most to laugh about, I guess. I would guess there are lots of topics women wouldn't find funny, the murder of Kitty Genovese comes to mind. I wonder what the author Duncan's favorite movie, Penn Jillette, would do with that topic. I wonder if it's ever figured in a rendition of "The Aristocrats".
It depends on who you are and where you find yourself, if you're lacking in sympathetic imagination to that extent. I don't think the inmates of the death camps would have found Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler particularly funny. I guess any who didn't would be accused of lacking a sense of humor. Really, why is that any more funny than the most offensive movie since Birth of a Nation, Life Is Beautiful? Loved Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in that movie, hated the Springtime for Hitler part of it.
Update: Message to my stalker: I Don't Practice Nazi Thinking, You Do
I really don't know a word for it but there should be a name for the frequently used tactic of argument by assholes that begins in distorting what someone said and replacing it with something that they never said. I never said what Jews should find offensive, I said that I doubted that inmates of DEATH CAMPS would have found Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler sequences to be funny. Of course, to start with, I wasn't telling anyone what they should find funny and, second, many millions of people murdered or slated to be murdered by the Nazis were not Jews. I don't think any victims of the Nazis were more significant than any others, they are all equal. We've been through that before, to rank the victims of the Nazis in terms of their worthiness of consideration is to put into practice the same thinking that led the Nazis to kill people for their ethnic identity, their status of disability or for their religious beliefs. I don't practice Nazi thinking, you do.
You're just lying about the rest of it too. I haven't looked but I imagine you repeated that on Duncan's Dunces as you've been doing for the past four years. I imagine Duncan thinks that's hilarious, for which you can tell him to bite me.
Update 2: Since I will not publish any more comments by you I have to tell people that your comment is another in the long line of examples of what I said needed a name in my last update. I didn't make any claims about, as you put it, "the relatives of those death camp inmates". Nor do I particularly care about their reactions if they were as you claim. I think if they found Springtime For Hitler to be hilarious they couldn't have thought very hard about the suffering of their relatives and the Nazis creed that there is an ethnic hierarchy, which you share which was the reason that they suffered and in so many millions of cases died. If you are referring to yourself, born well after the war, I wouldn't accuse you of an act of sympathetic imagination, as a self-centered idiot, you aren't capable of either sympathy or imagination.
I don't think it's anything to laugh about or to make light of, if making fun of it were effective in preventing it it would never have happened as the Nazis were mocked and ridiculed from the start of their organizing and it did nothing to prevent any of it. We've been through that, as well. Mel Brooks has been a good comic actor, writer and movie maker, though one who so often went for the easy laugh, that one thing he did was offensive. If he had been making movies before the war, they would have done nothing, whatsoever, to prevent the Nazis doing anything they did.
That power attributed to comedy and even satire is a lie, neither of them have nearly that much power. Their proven power would tend more to strengthen the malign aspects of life, as we have seen in the period since Andrew Dice Clay and others revived the worst in misogynistic, racist, etc. "humor," with the full approval of the community of comedians. Comedians, with rare exceptions, are all about going for the easy laugh. The Nazis, the Klan, fascists, etc. are fond of that kind of "humor". And so are you as a fan of Penn Jillette's movie which Duncan loved so much which so often features those things. And as Dorothy Parker pointed out, the kind of stuff that Mel Brooks does isn't satire, it's a form of light topical humor that doesn't go deep enough to be satire. You couldn't handle satire, it requires thought to experience.
Update 3: If you're auditioning for a job as my copy editor, forget it, my first requirement would be that anyone getting that job would not be an habitual liar and pathological stalker.
Imagined Futures 2 - If Hillary Clinton Wins
If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination she will face the immediate task of pulling together the Democrats who differed on her and Bernie Sanders candidacies so she can win in November, not only to win but try to win big enough to take the Senate and in our more remote hopes, the House.
That will depend on her having genuinely learned something from Bernie Sanders' impressive level of support and it will also, to a large extent, depend on Bernie Sanders' being effective in any negotiations with Hillary Clinton. While such a negotiation should not necessarily be for public consumption and certianly not for the public gloating of staffers and hangers on to the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, I would guess it might include guarantees of who will be appointed and who will not be appointed to, especially the financial positions in a Hillary Clinton administration. Both sides will have to be realistic about that and they will always have to keep in mind that if the Republicans win, entirely worse people will be in all positions. I think it may be necessary for Hillary Clinton to nominate a Vice President who has been more liberal than she has been. I have heard talk of the possibility of Sherrod Brown, I'm not sure if I think it would be a good idea in that it would make the task of retaking the Senate more difficult, though I think he would likely be a great president himself. If she did choose him, I think the combination of the two would be the most qualified top of the ticket in many decades.
If Hillary Clinton wins the election in November she will have to learn the lesson that Barack Obama so notably did not in 2010, that a Democratic president, facing the unprecedented obstruction of the Republican-fascists of today, needs to have Democratic control of both houses to make anything happen and to fend off the discouragement that failure brings. If Barack Obama had delivered on the promise of his presidency in 2009, with a Democratic Senate and House, we wouldn't be talking about a Bernie Sanders candidacy in 2016 because the failure of Obama to appoint reformers to financial posts and his absurd desire to have the Republicans like him is why he chose to cripple his own presidency. If she retains any illusions about having people like Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers or Eric Holder in her administration she should reconsider because such people are the reason that the Democrats lost in a year they should have won easily if Barack Obama had delivered the level of reform he promised.
I think a good part of Barack Obama's failure is due to his personality. He is a preppy jock who was a star at Harvard Law, which could bring me to the horrible appointment of Arne Duncan who was totally unsuited to be the Secretary of Education, overseeing a public school system when he'd never set foot in a public school as a student even once in his life. But I think Barack Obama's sense of male prerogatives, as that in virtually every single one of his predecessors as president, were a big part of his self-diminution of his own potential. I think he was entirely too full of himself and his ability to win over Republicans who used that to weaken him. You can recall the negotiations with the two phony-moderate Senators of my state, Snowe and Collins if you want to review.
Hillary Clinton, who has had the full treatment of the Republican-fascist, corporate sponsored hate campaign for going on three decades will enter the office without the illusions that her enemies will be won over. She will be prepared as no president since, I would guess, Lincoln was to face the full storm of such a campaign, again. I also think that she will not feel her womanhood is on the line in any decisions she takes, though she will know that one of the avenues of attack will be her gender as certainly as Barack Obama's race was in those made on him. Perhaps it is there that she will understand that her success depends far more on the wing of the Democratic Party which is entirely skeptical of the ability of the United States to dominate on the basis of military might. I think she should have learned in this nomination process what Barack Obama obviously never understood, that a Democratic President needs the support the Democrats and others who Obama's first Chief of Staff derided as "girly men". If she needs a reminder of that, she should look at how that asshole is doing as Mayor of Chicago and what that has done to the Democratic Party there.
Having Hillary Clinton as President could be one of the greatest opportunities that the United States has ever had to change things. She will almost certainly have appointments to the Supreme Court and other courts that could change the direction of that branch for decades. I would hope that her first priority in that is to abolish the abominable doctrine of corporate person hood, if I were president that would be an absolute requirement in making any judicial appointments, that the candidate must believe that product of the corrupt Gilded Era court must be struck down as one of the greatest of all dangers to democracy and government of, by and for The People. It also endangers the entire species as can be seen in the corporate lie campaign that has stalled the abandonment of fossil fuels and practices that are destroying our world. The revelations that oil company scientists informed oil executives of that, perhaps as long ago as the Nixon administration proves that they are a class of criminally insane crackpots who are willing to do in slow motion what the most insane advocates of nuclear war were willing to get over quickly. And they are willing to do it for money. That is the danger we face, a world in the hands of those people, at the mercy of those people or a world in which life can continue, in which human life can continue and in which democracy is possible.
That will depend on her having genuinely learned something from Bernie Sanders' impressive level of support and it will also, to a large extent, depend on Bernie Sanders' being effective in any negotiations with Hillary Clinton. While such a negotiation should not necessarily be for public consumption and certianly not for the public gloating of staffers and hangers on to the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, I would guess it might include guarantees of who will be appointed and who will not be appointed to, especially the financial positions in a Hillary Clinton administration. Both sides will have to be realistic about that and they will always have to keep in mind that if the Republicans win, entirely worse people will be in all positions. I think it may be necessary for Hillary Clinton to nominate a Vice President who has been more liberal than she has been. I have heard talk of the possibility of Sherrod Brown, I'm not sure if I think it would be a good idea in that it would make the task of retaking the Senate more difficult, though I think he would likely be a great president himself. If she did choose him, I think the combination of the two would be the most qualified top of the ticket in many decades.
If Hillary Clinton wins the election in November she will have to learn the lesson that Barack Obama so notably did not in 2010, that a Democratic president, facing the unprecedented obstruction of the Republican-fascists of today, needs to have Democratic control of both houses to make anything happen and to fend off the discouragement that failure brings. If Barack Obama had delivered on the promise of his presidency in 2009, with a Democratic Senate and House, we wouldn't be talking about a Bernie Sanders candidacy in 2016 because the failure of Obama to appoint reformers to financial posts and his absurd desire to have the Republicans like him is why he chose to cripple his own presidency. If she retains any illusions about having people like Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers or Eric Holder in her administration she should reconsider because such people are the reason that the Democrats lost in a year they should have won easily if Barack Obama had delivered the level of reform he promised.
I think a good part of Barack Obama's failure is due to his personality. He is a preppy jock who was a star at Harvard Law, which could bring me to the horrible appointment of Arne Duncan who was totally unsuited to be the Secretary of Education, overseeing a public school system when he'd never set foot in a public school as a student even once in his life. But I think Barack Obama's sense of male prerogatives, as that in virtually every single one of his predecessors as president, were a big part of his self-diminution of his own potential. I think he was entirely too full of himself and his ability to win over Republicans who used that to weaken him. You can recall the negotiations with the two phony-moderate Senators of my state, Snowe and Collins if you want to review.
Hillary Clinton, who has had the full treatment of the Republican-fascist, corporate sponsored hate campaign for going on three decades will enter the office without the illusions that her enemies will be won over. She will be prepared as no president since, I would guess, Lincoln was to face the full storm of such a campaign, again. I also think that she will not feel her womanhood is on the line in any decisions she takes, though she will know that one of the avenues of attack will be her gender as certainly as Barack Obama's race was in those made on him. Perhaps it is there that she will understand that her success depends far more on the wing of the Democratic Party which is entirely skeptical of the ability of the United States to dominate on the basis of military might. I think she should have learned in this nomination process what Barack Obama obviously never understood, that a Democratic President needs the support the Democrats and others who Obama's first Chief of Staff derided as "girly men". If she needs a reminder of that, she should look at how that asshole is doing as Mayor of Chicago and what that has done to the Democratic Party there.
Having Hillary Clinton as President could be one of the greatest opportunities that the United States has ever had to change things. She will almost certainly have appointments to the Supreme Court and other courts that could change the direction of that branch for decades. I would hope that her first priority in that is to abolish the abominable doctrine of corporate person hood, if I were president that would be an absolute requirement in making any judicial appointments, that the candidate must believe that product of the corrupt Gilded Era court must be struck down as one of the greatest of all dangers to democracy and government of, by and for The People. It also endangers the entire species as can be seen in the corporate lie campaign that has stalled the abandonment of fossil fuels and practices that are destroying our world. The revelations that oil company scientists informed oil executives of that, perhaps as long ago as the Nixon administration proves that they are a class of criminally insane crackpots who are willing to do in slow motion what the most insane advocates of nuclear war were willing to get over quickly. And they are willing to do it for money. That is the danger we face, a world in the hands of those people, at the mercy of those people or a world in which life can continue, in which human life can continue and in which democracy is possible.
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Polka Party
I don't particularly like polka music, to be fair, I'm not really that big on dance music. My father loved it, an Irish guy who grew up in the working class suburbs of Philadelphia, he knew lots of people from central-Europe and he loved polkas and kielbasa and such stuff. He used to listen to a Polka Party radio show after the late mass on Sunday mornings. The smell of kielbasa scrambled eggs and ketchup made me want to throw up - he'd make that while he listened, maybe that accounts for why I couldn't take polka music. To be fair, I can't say that I can take Irish dance music by the hour, either.
But time passed, I became a vegetarian when I was a teenager and maybe I eventually lost my revulsion for polka music. And another Polka Party program came to prominence on the University of New Hampshire student radio station, it made its DJ, Gary Sredzienski, a god to Poles around the world. I listen to it sometimes because it's not just about the music - which I find hard to take - it's about the spirit. Once after listening to it a Polish guy from Chicago happened to come by, I asked him if he was familiar with it, he couldn't believe anyone couldn't be. We agreed that four hundred years from now, on Saturday mornings Poles in the future would still be listening to Polka Party shows. You can listen to it live here, I'm listening to it right now or on Saturday mornings 9-11 Eastern Time or, I think, archived. I listen to it because it's fun, I like to think of people having harmless fun.
Update: Gary Sredzienski has an international following and last I heard was constantly in demand, something you aren't, never were and never will be.
Well, I can imagine people demanding you go away, but nothing else.
But time passed, I became a vegetarian when I was a teenager and maybe I eventually lost my revulsion for polka music. And another Polka Party program came to prominence on the University of New Hampshire student radio station, it made its DJ, Gary Sredzienski, a god to Poles around the world. I listen to it sometimes because it's not just about the music - which I find hard to take - it's about the spirit. Once after listening to it a Polish guy from Chicago happened to come by, I asked him if he was familiar with it, he couldn't believe anyone couldn't be. We agreed that four hundred years from now, on Saturday mornings Poles in the future would still be listening to Polka Party shows. You can listen to it live here, I'm listening to it right now or on Saturday mornings 9-11 Eastern Time or, I think, archived. I listen to it because it's fun, I like to think of people having harmless fun.
Update: Gary Sredzienski has an international following and last I heard was constantly in demand, something you aren't, never were and never will be.
Well, I can imagine people demanding you go away, but nothing else.
The Vacuum of Conceit And Lords of Infinite Creation
I took a bit of post-literate atheist flack for the first sentence in my post yesterday:
The current atheist-cosmologist ideologues are insisting that the universe can create itself out of nothing BEFORE THE UNIVERSE EXISTED and needing to redefine nothing in order to do it.
The part of that sentence which was derided was the idea of "before the universe existed," which was mocked as a failure of reason on my part.
But lost on the atheist "Brain Trusters" is the fact the sentence wasn't about an idea I was promoting, it was contained in an idea I rejected. An idea embraced by myriads of their atheist brethren.
And there is a lot more wrong with that idea than that there could have been a before, before the universe existed, if the present standard model of physics is, in fact, the last word in such matters, who knows if it is?
The idea I was responding to is most famously given by the celebrity cosmologist Stephen Hawking in his book, The Grand Design.
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing,
That's the most famous statement of the idea but he's hardly alone among celebrity atheist cosmologists in making that assertion. For example, Larry Krauss pushes the same idea with his own creedal formulation of it,
Let's begin by saying that not only would there have had to be a before, before the universe existed in that sentence, there would have had to be a law such as gravity, before there was any matter, space and time for it to have worked through. And the construction of the sentence implies that there were other laws, "such as" gravity in existence before the universe existed. If they existed there had to have been a "before" before the universe existed and, oddly enough, for the universe to be able to create itself and for that to be a definite outcome of this odd situation, that before the universe existed it had the imperative to create itself.
I have lost count how many impossible things are either contained or implied in that sentence, it may have sufficed for the minimal daily requirement of those you're supposed to think before breakfast,
And Hawking is hardly alone in going on about there being a before, before time, atheist cosmologists who hate the idea of an absolute beginning to the universe have all kinds of things happening before the universe began. You can read about them all over the place online, atheists are not shy about asserting many, wildly varied and even self contradicting scenarios of what happend before the universe began. Michio Kaku mentioned three, specifically in the quotation I used from his blog
This gives us a startling picture of the big bang, that our universe was born perhaps from the collision of two universes (the big splat theory), or sprouted from a parent universe, or simply popped into existence out of nothing. So universes are being created all the time. (But Hawking goes one step farther and says that therefore here is no need of God, since God is not necessary to create the universe. I wouldn't go that far. See a previous blog entry on my attitude towards that.)
I know it's asking a lot of an atheist who works in the newspaper racket, or pop music or doing lab work for some kind of ethology outfit in the North West that they understand something as long as four sentences but there are not only three events BEFORE the universe existed, there are two entire systems of multiple universes with, no doubt, jillions of events happening BEFORE OUR UNIVERSE BEGAN. And those are only three of the proposals, cosmologists seem to create new scenarios whenever someone questions their currently favorite one. Not only that but under these desperate attempts to use science to do what science was never equipped to do, kill off God, they must insist that there were universes that began after ours.
As an aside, one of the big brains who didn't quite get that I was pointing out the defects in the idea styles himself "Moe" so I think from now on I'll think of Skepsy, Moe and Simmy as a bottom of the barrel vaudeville act.
As I noted recently, Hugh Everett, the inventor of the idea of "the multi-verse" and those who believe in his denomination of that faith seriously, assert that every time so much as a florescent light flickers that new universes are created. I can't recall which of them came up with the florescent light line, I will, um, "credit" it when I find it. They are asserting that those universes express every possible alternative event possible must be created whenever anything happens in our universe.
I would like to know how they deal with such issues as how is "an event" defined, how is it extracted from the continuity that is time and existence. Is there an equivalent to an elementary particle of which "events" are constructed? Where does the event begin and where does it end so as to have a discrete existence so that its opposite - like an anti-particle(?) - causes its own discrete universe to pop into existence. I would like to know how, if it can't be turned into a discrete "thing" such an "event" can be plugged into their equations - which is the entire substance of their faith. And I would love an explanation of the mechanism of such stupendously fecund causation, in our universe, that such science used to care about, causation would seem to have much more modest powers of creating results.
It is not my fault that scientists have allowed a situation to come into being where idiots who believe they are great supporters and champions of science can be so abysmally unaware of what scientists are claiming, resting on their high school and college intro classes taken as requirements from a half-century ago - which they probably squeaked through with a C - and feeling very conceited and arrogant over their credentialed ignorance. That is what easily 90% of contemporary atheists conceive of as science, if not merely what they've picked up from watching cable TV and, maybe, NOVA.
It is my experience that an informed theist is more likely to have some understanding of what the atheists of cosmology, neuro-sci and the even more obvious current pseudo-scientists are claiming. Of course there are religious people who are as ignorant as your typical blog thread atheist savant, I'm not talking about the bottom of the barrel where that snark came from.
Like it or not, atheists such as Stephen Hawking have claimed the right to write science fiction in equations and to insist that it be considered real because they can make their equations balance. The extent to which they have to invent stuff to make their equations balance doesn't seem to matter to their fellow atheists in science, though some of them are certainly not happy with the idea that such Lords of Creation don't need to deal with things like observation, actual measurement and generating testable theories.
It might be useful for these guys who create quadrillions of universes our of nothing to consider what they're doing in light of the work of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, I would guess an even more eminent physicist within the science of his time than Hawking is today. He said:
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.
In most of his work, he had a definite "something" that could be observed and assertions about it tested, there was a real thing that he could apply his work in measurement to. In his extensive work with an idea that couldn't be, the luminiferous aether, he went through all kinds of intellectual gyrations to make all kinds of definite assertions about it, its nature, its amazing properties, and even its measurement. I am not certain that it was his work on the ather is what led to some attributing the quote to him, in effect "“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” made before Einstein published his 1905 papers which demolished Kelvin's work with the aether, which is, today, believed to not exist. From what I gather, it's entire "existence" in 19th century science is due to some physicists believing it was necessary to make their physics and, thus, cosmology come out at a balance. They may be believed to have been rather quaint, today. I'm sure anyone proposing to revive the luminferous aether would be considered a quaint eccentric. But what we're asked to swallow wholesale is an infinitely, literally infinitely, larger and even less evidenced mass of stuff.
Note:
The theistic philosopher, William Lane Craig has pointed out that there is a big problem if these guys want to maintain some of their most cherished physical laws, such as the Laws of Thermodynamics, If the only universe we know is part of an ensemble of universes extending infinitely into the past then at some point in the infinite past, the whole thing would have had to wind down in heat death or some such eschatological outcome. Our universe would have had to have devolved into a static, lifeless, featureless, oblivion. Other than to think it's an interesting idea, I can't claim to have gone far into that one. From what I've heard and read in answer to it, neither have the cosmologists.
It seems to me they can claim that the physics of this universe, of which Laws of Thermodynamics are an integral part, is peculiar to our universe and, therefore, their ensemble of universes extending into an infinite past operates under some other law that preempts that impossible hurdle to our existence, but, then, they created their multiverses out of the physical laws of this universe so that would mean any universe or multi-verse calculated out of those expectations is, in fact, illusory. And if our physics is peculiar to our universe there would be no reason to believe that it had priority over any physics in any other universe or in their imagined ensembles of universes. In which case many of our theoretical physicists and cosmologists are producing nothing but imaginary stuff out of an assumption that the mathematics that can address the observable universe is capable of creating universes through the balancing of equations.
Since there likely are an infinite number of possible relations among numbers and sets of numbers, that would mean they could create an infinite number of imaginary universes, none of which were any more real than the ones you can make out of words to be published in pulp paperbacks with a lurid and weird, adolescent enticing sexy cover painted by some hack artist. Which is what I suspect is happening. They have allowed the habits of theoretical physics, the most esteemed part of physics, to overtake the necessity of science being able to observe what it studies and to test predictions that are made about the things theorists think up. The habits that arise through an excess of esteem and unknowing respect and power granted through those making people get entirely out of hand is hardly an unknown phenomenon.
Now, I'm going to go make breakfast.
The current atheist-cosmologist ideologues are insisting that the universe can create itself out of nothing BEFORE THE UNIVERSE EXISTED and needing to redefine nothing in order to do it.
The part of that sentence which was derided was the idea of "before the universe existed," which was mocked as a failure of reason on my part.
But lost on the atheist "Brain Trusters" is the fact the sentence wasn't about an idea I was promoting, it was contained in an idea I rejected. An idea embraced by myriads of their atheist brethren.
And there is a lot more wrong with that idea than that there could have been a before, before the universe existed, if the present standard model of physics is, in fact, the last word in such matters, who knows if it is?
The idea I was responding to is most famously given by the celebrity cosmologist Stephen Hawking in his book, The Grand Design.
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing,
That's the most famous statement of the idea but he's hardly alone among celebrity atheist cosmologists in making that assertion. For example, Larry Krauss pushes the same idea with his own creedal formulation of it,
Let's begin by saying that not only would there have had to be a before, before the universe existed in that sentence, there would have had to be a law such as gravity, before there was any matter, space and time for it to have worked through. And the construction of the sentence implies that there were other laws, "such as" gravity in existence before the universe existed. If they existed there had to have been a "before" before the universe existed and, oddly enough, for the universe to be able to create itself and for that to be a definite outcome of this odd situation, that before the universe existed it had the imperative to create itself.
I have lost count how many impossible things are either contained or implied in that sentence, it may have sufficed for the minimal daily requirement of those you're supposed to think before breakfast,
And Hawking is hardly alone in going on about there being a before, before time, atheist cosmologists who hate the idea of an absolute beginning to the universe have all kinds of things happening before the universe began. You can read about them all over the place online, atheists are not shy about asserting many, wildly varied and even self contradicting scenarios of what happend before the universe began. Michio Kaku mentioned three, specifically in the quotation I used from his blog
This gives us a startling picture of the big bang, that our universe was born perhaps from the collision of two universes (the big splat theory), or sprouted from a parent universe, or simply popped into existence out of nothing. So universes are being created all the time. (But Hawking goes one step farther and says that therefore here is no need of God, since God is not necessary to create the universe. I wouldn't go that far. See a previous blog entry on my attitude towards that.)
I know it's asking a lot of an atheist who works in the newspaper racket, or pop music or doing lab work for some kind of ethology outfit in the North West that they understand something as long as four sentences but there are not only three events BEFORE the universe existed, there are two entire systems of multiple universes with, no doubt, jillions of events happening BEFORE OUR UNIVERSE BEGAN. And those are only three of the proposals, cosmologists seem to create new scenarios whenever someone questions their currently favorite one. Not only that but under these desperate attempts to use science to do what science was never equipped to do, kill off God, they must insist that there were universes that began after ours.
As an aside, one of the big brains who didn't quite get that I was pointing out the defects in the idea styles himself "Moe" so I think from now on I'll think of Skepsy, Moe and Simmy as a bottom of the barrel vaudeville act.
As I noted recently, Hugh Everett, the inventor of the idea of "the multi-verse" and those who believe in his denomination of that faith seriously, assert that every time so much as a florescent light flickers that new universes are created. I can't recall which of them came up with the florescent light line, I will, um, "credit" it when I find it. They are asserting that those universes express every possible alternative event possible must be created whenever anything happens in our universe.
I would like to know how they deal with such issues as how is "an event" defined, how is it extracted from the continuity that is time and existence. Is there an equivalent to an elementary particle of which "events" are constructed? Where does the event begin and where does it end so as to have a discrete existence so that its opposite - like an anti-particle(?) - causes its own discrete universe to pop into existence. I would like to know how, if it can't be turned into a discrete "thing" such an "event" can be plugged into their equations - which is the entire substance of their faith. And I would love an explanation of the mechanism of such stupendously fecund causation, in our universe, that such science used to care about, causation would seem to have much more modest powers of creating results.
It is not my fault that scientists have allowed a situation to come into being where idiots who believe they are great supporters and champions of science can be so abysmally unaware of what scientists are claiming, resting on their high school and college intro classes taken as requirements from a half-century ago - which they probably squeaked through with a C - and feeling very conceited and arrogant over their credentialed ignorance. That is what easily 90% of contemporary atheists conceive of as science, if not merely what they've picked up from watching cable TV and, maybe, NOVA.
It is my experience that an informed theist is more likely to have some understanding of what the atheists of cosmology, neuro-sci and the even more obvious current pseudo-scientists are claiming. Of course there are religious people who are as ignorant as your typical blog thread atheist savant, I'm not talking about the bottom of the barrel where that snark came from.
Like it or not, atheists such as Stephen Hawking have claimed the right to write science fiction in equations and to insist that it be considered real because they can make their equations balance. The extent to which they have to invent stuff to make their equations balance doesn't seem to matter to their fellow atheists in science, though some of them are certainly not happy with the idea that such Lords of Creation don't need to deal with things like observation, actual measurement and generating testable theories.
It might be useful for these guys who create quadrillions of universes our of nothing to consider what they're doing in light of the work of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, I would guess an even more eminent physicist within the science of his time than Hawking is today. He said:
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.
In most of his work, he had a definite "something" that could be observed and assertions about it tested, there was a real thing that he could apply his work in measurement to. In his extensive work with an idea that couldn't be, the luminiferous aether, he went through all kinds of intellectual gyrations to make all kinds of definite assertions about it, its nature, its amazing properties, and even its measurement. I am not certain that it was his work on the ather is what led to some attributing the quote to him, in effect "“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” made before Einstein published his 1905 papers which demolished Kelvin's work with the aether, which is, today, believed to not exist. From what I gather, it's entire "existence" in 19th century science is due to some physicists believing it was necessary to make their physics and, thus, cosmology come out at a balance. They may be believed to have been rather quaint, today. I'm sure anyone proposing to revive the luminferous aether would be considered a quaint eccentric. But what we're asked to swallow wholesale is an infinitely, literally infinitely, larger and even less evidenced mass of stuff.
Note:
The theistic philosopher, William Lane Craig has pointed out that there is a big problem if these guys want to maintain some of their most cherished physical laws, such as the Laws of Thermodynamics, If the only universe we know is part of an ensemble of universes extending infinitely into the past then at some point in the infinite past, the whole thing would have had to wind down in heat death or some such eschatological outcome. Our universe would have had to have devolved into a static, lifeless, featureless, oblivion. Other than to think it's an interesting idea, I can't claim to have gone far into that one. From what I've heard and read in answer to it, neither have the cosmologists.
It seems to me they can claim that the physics of this universe, of which Laws of Thermodynamics are an integral part, is peculiar to our universe and, therefore, their ensemble of universes extending into an infinite past operates under some other law that preempts that impossible hurdle to our existence, but, then, they created their multiverses out of the physical laws of this universe so that would mean any universe or multi-verse calculated out of those expectations is, in fact, illusory. And if our physics is peculiar to our universe there would be no reason to believe that it had priority over any physics in any other universe or in their imagined ensembles of universes. In which case many of our theoretical physicists and cosmologists are producing nothing but imaginary stuff out of an assumption that the mathematics that can address the observable universe is capable of creating universes through the balancing of equations.
Since there likely are an infinite number of possible relations among numbers and sets of numbers, that would mean they could create an infinite number of imaginary universes, none of which were any more real than the ones you can make out of words to be published in pulp paperbacks with a lurid and weird, adolescent enticing sexy cover painted by some hack artist. Which is what I suspect is happening. They have allowed the habits of theoretical physics, the most esteemed part of physics, to overtake the necessity of science being able to observe what it studies and to test predictions that are made about the things theorists think up. The habits that arise through an excess of esteem and unknowing respect and power granted through those making people get entirely out of hand is hardly an unknown phenomenon.
Now, I'm going to go make breakfast.
Friday, April 15, 2016
A Rule To Live By
If an idiot and a liar is making fun of what you say, it's a good bet that you're making sense. That's not an original thought, William Blake also thought so, Listen to the fool’s reproach! it is a kingly title! Only don't listen too long because it quickly turns into a waste of time. I wasted a number of years being diverted at a blog that was that kind of lotus land. I'd say that many still are but it's hardly as many as used to ten years ago.
Update: Only an idiot wouldn't realize that an idiot is often a liar but not so often as a liar is also an idiot. I could name hundreds. George W. Bush, Douglas Feith, Sarah Palin, the guy who stalks me, easily a third to a half of the people who frequent said blog.
Update: Only an idiot wouldn't realize that an idiot is often a liar but not so often as a liar is also an idiot. I could name hundreds. George W. Bush, Douglas Feith, Sarah Palin, the guy who stalks me, easily a third to a half of the people who frequent said blog.
Horace Silver Quintet - Nica's Dream
Blue Mitchell, trumpet
Junior Cook, tenor sax
Horace Silver, piano
Gene Taylor, bass
Roy Brooks, drums
Junior Cook Quintet - Sweet Cakes
Blue Mitchell, trumpet
Junior Cook, tenor sax
Dolo Coker, piano
Gene Taylor, bass
Roy Brooks, drums
Another Answer To Another Idiotic Assertion
Atheism, turning people into objects, is just about always destructive of liberalism, so your claim is as empty as the brain-only nonsense dispelled below.
There are more problems with that ideological illogic which I'll deal with in the coming weeks.
Update: Reading such idiotic comments only makes me regret the hours I wasted on the idea that anything important ever happened on Baby Blue. Eventually anyone with a mind reaches that point.
There are more problems with that ideological illogic which I'll deal with in the coming weeks.
Update: Reading such idiotic comments only makes me regret the hours I wasted on the idea that anything important ever happened on Baby Blue. Eventually anyone with a mind reaches that point.
Atheism Requires Miracles And Atheists Like To Call Theirs "Science"
The current atheist-cosmologist ideologues are insisting that the universe can create itself out of nothing BEFORE THE UNIVERSE EXISTED and needing to redefine nothing in order to do it. Stephen Hawkins declarations include both that "nothing" is the law of gravity which would then have had to have existed before the matter that gravity is expressed through existed* and, according to some celebrity cosmologist interpretations that that "nothing" includes the quadrillions and more universes invented by cosmologists. If you read that link you will note that Michio Kaku kind of gives away the original motive of this stuff.
This gives us a startling picture of the big bang, that our universe was born perhaps from the collision of two universes (the big splat theory), or sprouted from a parent universe, or simply popped into existence out of nothing. [ Which of the three? Notice that in this game of creating jillions of universes, you're nothing unless you come up with your own denomination of multi-universe or string-M-theory faith.] So universes are being created all the time. (But Hawking goes one step farther and says that therefore here is no need of God, since God is not necessary to create the universe. I wouldn't go that far. See a previous blog entry on my attitude towards that.)
The motive in this, and a rather stunning amount of science, is to try, as the son of Francis Crick put it, "to put the last nail in the coffin of God". He said that was his father's reason to take up "the hard question" of consciousness, that he believed by coming up with a material explanation of consciousness that he would finally kill off the possibility of believing in God. Crick's son noted that he and his partner in the effort failed to do so.
A year ago, today, I noted that the atheist's theory of the mind, that it was the epiphenomenon of physical structures required our brains to be doing something similar to what happens in many of the multi-universe fantasies, they would have to create the structures to be ideas before those ideas existed in the skull to tell the brain
a. that it needed to make a new structure,
b. what that structure needed to be to produce the right idea,
c. how to make that structure to be that idea and not a different structure which would be the wrong idea.
d. how their proposed process would work in the real time in which we experience thought, with its extremely rapid development of ideas and accounting for the fact that we rapidly and constantly modify ideas, applying them to new contexts, etc. all of which would have to have their own brain-made structures to account for all of those ideas that rush around in our minds.
I will extend those problems with a summary:
Ideas consist of information and under the atheist "brain-only" mind the brain would have to correctly do all of that at the speed of thought WITHOUT ANY INFORMATION IN OUR SKULL INFORMING THE BRAIN OF WHAT TO DO.
I have been asking those questions here and at other places where atheists congregate for a year and, so far, not a single one of them has done more than incant the words "natural selection" "evolution" "DNA" like the magic charms they are for so many atheists, instead of them having any fixed meaning. Of course none of those could account for what I asked because any new idea would not have been put in our skulls by any of those, ideas which are entirely original to our species.
The most recent response I've had from someone who wasn't one of the usual, post-literate idiots who troll here was that he didn't have the answer to those questions and that I didn't either (so there!).
Well, I do have an answer, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE BRAIN TO DO THOSE THINGS BEFORE THE INFORMATION TO INSTRUCT IT TO DO THEM IS PRESENT IN THE BRAIN. Therefore the brain-only model is impossible.
Not only that but since the information would have to be present to instruct the brain to make any such structures, that the idea couldn't be reliant on any physical structure that the brain might build but had to exist in the mind, independent of any physical structure built by the brain.
I think the only plausible atheist-materialist work around to this would be the claim that all possible ideas that will eventually exist in the mind would have to already have existed in our skull before we had our ideas and that is as if not more ludicrous than the things that atheist cosmologists have come up with to get round things they don't like because they are afraid people will believe in God. That would only force the question of what genetic structures there were that could contain that information, I doubt that the entire genome of any individual could account for that amount of information. The DNA and the associated cellular apparatus would have to have that information in it already and I don't think there is enough matter in them to contain that information. The idea is ridiculous. If you have some other means for "DNA" to do it, go ahead, try it, remembering your mechanism would have to work in the real time of our thinking.
If someone arrives at a belief in God because of these observations, that does not a single thing to dispose of any of those questions. The angry, enraged fear of atheists over this and similar problems with their ideology doesn't change a single thing about the problem being there. That atheists don't like that doesn't matter a single bit, that doesn't dispose of the problem for their ridiculous and ill considered and ideologically motivated "brain-only" orthodoxy. I certainly don't mistake this as the "proof of God" I've been accused of mounting, that so many atheists mistake this exercise of any kind of "proof" merely shows how superficial and shallow their idea of what you have to do to prove something is. Which could account for why they grasp on to such ideas as "brain-only" and the myriad and self-contradicting schemes of string, M-theory, and multi-universe cosmology like a frightened,abused, tortured lab monkey to a chicken wire and terry cloth mother figure. I have to ask why they're so afraid of the possibility of God that they'll go to those lengths. I guess just not believing is no more satisfying to them than it is to anyone else.
* I was told that gravity existed because matter existed, though I'm not interested enough to see how many times they might have changed their mind on that point in the past half-century. It almost makes you wonder how much they really know about what their terms mean, to start with.
Update: Apparently this sentence has the brain-only Brain Trusters stumped,
If someone arrives at a belief in God because of these observations, that does not a single thing to dispose of any of those questions.
Apparently it didn't occur to the big-brains of baby blue to read the paragraph it introduces or to discover what observations it refers to. See what I mean about the post-literacy of the idiots who believe they are the intelligentsia of the modern era?
Update 2: Why should I restrict myself to sentences that are easy for the Dunc, Tlaz and Simmy set to read?
Update 3: (Won't make sense to anyone who doesn't know him) DAS, aka Alberich10, can do whatever he wants to. I still go back and look at his old blog once in a while, lots of interesting stuff, wish he'd kept it up. By the way, I don't think his comment means what you think it does, try reading the first and last words. Why he still hangs around that meat-head locker, I don't know. He's old enough to decide for himself.
This gives us a startling picture of the big bang, that our universe was born perhaps from the collision of two universes (the big splat theory), or sprouted from a parent universe, or simply popped into existence out of nothing. [ Which of the three? Notice that in this game of creating jillions of universes, you're nothing unless you come up with your own denomination of multi-universe or string-M-theory faith.] So universes are being created all the time. (But Hawking goes one step farther and says that therefore here is no need of God, since God is not necessary to create the universe. I wouldn't go that far. See a previous blog entry on my attitude towards that.)
The motive in this, and a rather stunning amount of science, is to try, as the son of Francis Crick put it, "to put the last nail in the coffin of God". He said that was his father's reason to take up "the hard question" of consciousness, that he believed by coming up with a material explanation of consciousness that he would finally kill off the possibility of believing in God. Crick's son noted that he and his partner in the effort failed to do so.
A year ago, today, I noted that the atheist's theory of the mind, that it was the epiphenomenon of physical structures required our brains to be doing something similar to what happens in many of the multi-universe fantasies, they would have to create the structures to be ideas before those ideas existed in the skull to tell the brain
a. that it needed to make a new structure,
b. what that structure needed to be to produce the right idea,
c. how to make that structure to be that idea and not a different structure which would be the wrong idea.
d. how their proposed process would work in the real time in which we experience thought, with its extremely rapid development of ideas and accounting for the fact that we rapidly and constantly modify ideas, applying them to new contexts, etc. all of which would have to have their own brain-made structures to account for all of those ideas that rush around in our minds.
I will extend those problems with a summary:
Ideas consist of information and under the atheist "brain-only" mind the brain would have to correctly do all of that at the speed of thought WITHOUT ANY INFORMATION IN OUR SKULL INFORMING THE BRAIN OF WHAT TO DO.
I have been asking those questions here and at other places where atheists congregate for a year and, so far, not a single one of them has done more than incant the words "natural selection" "evolution" "DNA" like the magic charms they are for so many atheists, instead of them having any fixed meaning. Of course none of those could account for what I asked because any new idea would not have been put in our skulls by any of those, ideas which are entirely original to our species.
The most recent response I've had from someone who wasn't one of the usual, post-literate idiots who troll here was that he didn't have the answer to those questions and that I didn't either (so there!).
Well, I do have an answer, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE BRAIN TO DO THOSE THINGS BEFORE THE INFORMATION TO INSTRUCT IT TO DO THEM IS PRESENT IN THE BRAIN. Therefore the brain-only model is impossible.
Not only that but since the information would have to be present to instruct the brain to make any such structures, that the idea couldn't be reliant on any physical structure that the brain might build but had to exist in the mind, independent of any physical structure built by the brain.
I think the only plausible atheist-materialist work around to this would be the claim that all possible ideas that will eventually exist in the mind would have to already have existed in our skull before we had our ideas and that is as if not more ludicrous than the things that atheist cosmologists have come up with to get round things they don't like because they are afraid people will believe in God. That would only force the question of what genetic structures there were that could contain that information, I doubt that the entire genome of any individual could account for that amount of information. The DNA and the associated cellular apparatus would have to have that information in it already and I don't think there is enough matter in them to contain that information. The idea is ridiculous. If you have some other means for "DNA" to do it, go ahead, try it, remembering your mechanism would have to work in the real time of our thinking.
If someone arrives at a belief in God because of these observations, that does not a single thing to dispose of any of those questions. The angry, enraged fear of atheists over this and similar problems with their ideology doesn't change a single thing about the problem being there. That atheists don't like that doesn't matter a single bit, that doesn't dispose of the problem for their ridiculous and ill considered and ideologically motivated "brain-only" orthodoxy. I certainly don't mistake this as the "proof of God" I've been accused of mounting, that so many atheists mistake this exercise of any kind of "proof" merely shows how superficial and shallow their idea of what you have to do to prove something is. Which could account for why they grasp on to such ideas as "brain-only" and the myriad and self-contradicting schemes of string, M-theory, and multi-universe cosmology like a frightened,abused, tortured lab monkey to a chicken wire and terry cloth mother figure. I have to ask why they're so afraid of the possibility of God that they'll go to those lengths. I guess just not believing is no more satisfying to them than it is to anyone else.
* I was told that gravity existed because matter existed, though I'm not interested enough to see how many times they might have changed their mind on that point in the past half-century. It almost makes you wonder how much they really know about what their terms mean, to start with.
Update: Apparently this sentence has the brain-only Brain Trusters stumped,
If someone arrives at a belief in God because of these observations, that does not a single thing to dispose of any of those questions.
Apparently it didn't occur to the big-brains of baby blue to read the paragraph it introduces or to discover what observations it refers to. See what I mean about the post-literacy of the idiots who believe they are the intelligentsia of the modern era?
Update 2: Why should I restrict myself to sentences that are easy for the Dunc, Tlaz and Simmy set to read?
Update 3: (Won't make sense to anyone who doesn't know him) DAS, aka Alberich10, can do whatever he wants to. I still go back and look at his old blog once in a while, lots of interesting stuff, wish he'd kept it up. By the way, I don't think his comment means what you think it does, try reading the first and last words. Why he still hangs around that meat-head locker, I don't know. He's old enough to decide for himself.
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Horace Silver Quintet - Song For My Father
I'm not sure of who the musicians on this recording are other than Horace Silver. I think the trumpet is Carmell Jones and the Tenor might be Junior Cook. I don't recognize the bass player or drummer, though the drummer might be Lex Humphries. My eyes aren't too good. According to the notes the musicians in this Copenhagen performance aren't the same as those on the album where this was the title piece, if that's true I'm probably wrong. I wish they were listed.
Art Blakey and The Jazz Messangers - Yama
Tenor Saxophone - Wayne Shorter
Trumpet - Lee Morgan
Piano - Bobby Timmons
Bass - Jymie Merritt
Drums - Art Blakey
Bobby Timmons solo on this is one of my favorites, though those of Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter are no less great. One of those things I've got to watch now often I listen to it because I never want it to stop being fresh.
A Last Issue Of The Challenge To The Brain Dead Brain Only Orthodoxy
Only one more day before I declare materialism has failed, see details here.
Without Equality Sexual Revolution Only Leads Further Into Oppression
Note; I wrote this on New Years day 2011, after the criminal complaints in Sweden against Julian Assange were made public. I'd pointed out in comments that the two women who lodged the complaints had both had consensual sex with him in which there were issues over whether or not he had used condoms as requested or over the not unheard of issue of condom failure. Lost in the conversation was the fact that neither of the women who agreed to have him come back to their place for sex knew Assange except for the fact that he was a famous political figure. That such a stupid act as someone inviting a stranger to have sex with them, more than a quarter of a century after the discovery of HIV and centuries after the discovery of other sexually transmitted diseases got no mention shocked me. I was a lot more naive even that short a time ago, I still bought the idea that the educated, alleged intelligentsia, especially the alleged liberal intelligentsia, were a lot smarter than they are. That delusion was worn away by the internet and online comments. The line on the graph of that estimate is still in free fall. Thinking about such things is encouraged to be dangerously and fatally naive.
Imagine you have a gay son. Of course some of you won't have to imagine that because you have a gay son, or, perhaps, a son who is gay and hasn't come out. Imagine your gay son is a teenager or young adult. Immediately, you know that it is very likely that your gay son is going to have sex with other gay men, if not when he's a teenager, when he's an adult. You know about AIDS and HIV, you know that it is spread through unprotected anal sex and you might know that anal sex is among the most common* sexual practices among gay men today. If you are aware of what is known about the transmission of HIV you certainly would want to encourage your son to not engage in unprotected anal sex and, if you are brave enough, you might at least make certain that he is aware of what he needs to know to lessen his chances of becoming infected. That's not easy, even for a gay uncle who is all too well aware of what AIDS is. I know this from personal experience. I would imagine it's harder for most straight parents.
One of the most important realizations about the AIDS epidemic in gay men in the 1980s and 90s was that it was largely a product of the legal oppression of gay men. Gay men hadn't been allowed to marry, they were forced to remain hidden to escape discrimination and violence. That situation prevented many gay men from forming intimate sexual relationships that were ongoing, though some did manage to have them. It also led to the phenomenon of known cruising spots where you could find other men who would have sex with you, strangers who would have sex anonymously and who you might never see again. Those places were everywhere, there were guides published of where to find anonymous sex even in the most surprising rural locations.
Even before AIDS, the practice of casual sex with strangers led to very high rates of venereal diseases among gay men including hepatitis, I remember hearing one gay man assert that having hepatitis was something of a right of passage for gay men. That hepatitis is a seriously dangerous illness, that often leads to cancer of the liver, wasn't taken seriously by a lot of gay men and most other STDs were thought of as being a minor inconvenience. Again, there were and are gay men who don't engage in casual sex with strangers, there are many.
With the identification of AIDS , even before the virus was identified, lessening the impact of the practice of anonymous sex among gay men led to the temporary decrease in new HIV infections, but only after a massive effort to change habits. And that effort was met with strong objection, especially on the part of some of the theorists of gay politics of the 70s. Anything that discouraged gay men from having casual sex with whomever, in whatever way was declared by these thinkers to be internalized oppression. They held that the liberation of sex from love was a major achievement of the gay revolution they imagined they were the bulwark of. They rejected the public health campaign that encouraged condom use and taking measure to protect gay men from the virus, in the early days of the crisis, in the most strident terms. Apparently something called “sex” was, they imagined, separable from the people who participated in it. Which goes as great thinking in some quarters.
When Gloria Steinem said “The sexual revolution was not our war,” it was a brilliant insight. The sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s were mostly for the benefit of straight men, Hugh Hefner's adolescent fantasy life becoming generally available. Without equality, without both political and social equality and the rights that equality is made of, just being able to have sex without social and legal repercussions is bound to result in an extension of oppression. That has been the case extending into history when men were almost always free to rape slaves with impunity, with the approval, explicit or implied, of the law and general society**. I assert that it was also not the revolution that gay men needed either.
The dynamics of freeing sex in a culture of inequality is somewhat harder to see in gay men because even gay men aren't oppressed in the same way and to the extent that women are. But there are inequalities within gay relationships, sometimes economic, sometimes based on differences in intelligence and experience, quite often based on relative psychological vulnerabilities and not infrequently on the basis of differences in physical strength. The variations within any identified group are enough to make any general assertions about the members of that group, increasingly inaccurate.
Some people have noted that the AIDS crisis organized gay men as nothing else ever had. After the idiocy of the fashionable political cant of the 70s was overcome, to some extent, gay communities organized to try to change behavior and stop the transmission of the virus. And that was pretty successful until the idiotic assertion that “AIDS is over” was declared with the availability of drugs to suppress the virus in those who already had it. Though that was a lie, there are about 40,000 new infections in the United States every year, the drugs have major and serious side effects and are expensive and there is no guarantee that the virus won't continue to generate resistant forms that could be even more devastating than the original strains were.
And, as you know, women are infected with HIV through vaginal sex as well as through anal sex by men who are infected. Straight men are often infected through anonymous sex with women or men just as gay men are. I suspect that for many women, who have grown up with the idea that AIDS is primarily a problem for gay men are at the stage gay men were in the early days before the syndrome even had a name.
Of course this is all by way of explanation for my comments on the accusations made about Julian Assange. Being a witness to the deaths of dozens of gay men I knew, knowing that just about all of them with a few exceptions, likely were infected through casual sex with someone they didn't know, knowing that women can be infected by men, all of that informs my thinking on whether or not people should be having casual sex with people they don't know in 2011. And the fact is they shouldn't. Women deserve better than they're going to get from men under those circumstances, men who have sex with men deserve better than they get from it. There is nothing liberated about being infected with HIV or hepatitis or chlamydia or any number of other infections that can injure and kill you. Having sex with someone who can persuade you to engage in sex you don't want or who can trick or force you into it is the opposite of free choice. No more than getting robbed by a conman. And there is no law you can make that will protect you from any of that which is stronger than protecting yourself. And there is nothing that is more likely to protect you than knowing who it is you're agreeing to have sex with.
There is no law that is going to protect you from a good con man who is already in your house or in your bed.
Imagine that these women had sex with a man who was infected with HIV and he was enough of a con artist to convince them to engage in sex without a condom. I would find it hard to believe anyone who doesn't realize that is possible for many if not most women or gay men, especially if they are young and inexperienced. There is no law that is going to protect you from a good con man who is already in your house or in your bed.
I have nieces who I love as well as if they were my daughters, I have nephews who I feel the same way about. I don't want them to have sex with people they don't know because it is dangerous and it leads to a general cheapening of relationships and a decreased respect for other people. I don't want them to grow up feeling coerced into having dangerous and casual sex with people who they have no reason to believe will care about them and have any regard for their well being. The sexual revolution wasn't the right war. The one for equality is. Equality is the supreme political value, with it comes all other rights. Equality is valued less that liberty precisely because it comes with personal obligations to treat other people as you would want to be treated, and more so if you don't think you deserve to be treated well. Only within a culture of the personal restraints required by equality would it be safe to assume that you could engage in casual sex with strangers safely. And even within that, other, culture and with those unavailable assumptions, it would still be risky enough to be unwise if not irresponsible.
* There is a lot of evidence that anal sex wasn't the predominant form of sex among gay men in the United States until the 1970s. There is a large percentage of gay men who don't practice anal sex even today, due to personal preference and in response to HIV. Personally, I didn't and don't and am disgusted at the coercion that gay men often experienced to engage in it has, apparently, become acceptable among young straight people.
** Hagar's treatment in Genesis is pretty standard treatment for slaves. In the story Sarah even suggested it to Abraham as a means of having a son. But the idea that she might have sex with a slave, if it was Abraham who was infertile, doesn't seem to have been seen as an option.
Note: You might want to read this more recent discussion between Gloria Steinem and Suheir Hammad which discusses some of these issues.
Imagine you have a gay son. Of course some of you won't have to imagine that because you have a gay son, or, perhaps, a son who is gay and hasn't come out. Imagine your gay son is a teenager or young adult. Immediately, you know that it is very likely that your gay son is going to have sex with other gay men, if not when he's a teenager, when he's an adult. You know about AIDS and HIV, you know that it is spread through unprotected anal sex and you might know that anal sex is among the most common* sexual practices among gay men today. If you are aware of what is known about the transmission of HIV you certainly would want to encourage your son to not engage in unprotected anal sex and, if you are brave enough, you might at least make certain that he is aware of what he needs to know to lessen his chances of becoming infected. That's not easy, even for a gay uncle who is all too well aware of what AIDS is. I know this from personal experience. I would imagine it's harder for most straight parents.
One of the most important realizations about the AIDS epidemic in gay men in the 1980s and 90s was that it was largely a product of the legal oppression of gay men. Gay men hadn't been allowed to marry, they were forced to remain hidden to escape discrimination and violence. That situation prevented many gay men from forming intimate sexual relationships that were ongoing, though some did manage to have them. It also led to the phenomenon of known cruising spots where you could find other men who would have sex with you, strangers who would have sex anonymously and who you might never see again. Those places were everywhere, there were guides published of where to find anonymous sex even in the most surprising rural locations.
Even before AIDS, the practice of casual sex with strangers led to very high rates of venereal diseases among gay men including hepatitis, I remember hearing one gay man assert that having hepatitis was something of a right of passage for gay men. That hepatitis is a seriously dangerous illness, that often leads to cancer of the liver, wasn't taken seriously by a lot of gay men and most other STDs were thought of as being a minor inconvenience. Again, there were and are gay men who don't engage in casual sex with strangers, there are many.
With the identification of AIDS , even before the virus was identified, lessening the impact of the practice of anonymous sex among gay men led to the temporary decrease in new HIV infections, but only after a massive effort to change habits. And that effort was met with strong objection, especially on the part of some of the theorists of gay politics of the 70s. Anything that discouraged gay men from having casual sex with whomever, in whatever way was declared by these thinkers to be internalized oppression. They held that the liberation of sex from love was a major achievement of the gay revolution they imagined they were the bulwark of. They rejected the public health campaign that encouraged condom use and taking measure to protect gay men from the virus, in the early days of the crisis, in the most strident terms. Apparently something called “sex” was, they imagined, separable from the people who participated in it. Which goes as great thinking in some quarters.
When Gloria Steinem said “The sexual revolution was not our war,” it was a brilliant insight. The sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s were mostly for the benefit of straight men, Hugh Hefner's adolescent fantasy life becoming generally available. Without equality, without both political and social equality and the rights that equality is made of, just being able to have sex without social and legal repercussions is bound to result in an extension of oppression. That has been the case extending into history when men were almost always free to rape slaves with impunity, with the approval, explicit or implied, of the law and general society**. I assert that it was also not the revolution that gay men needed either.
The dynamics of freeing sex in a culture of inequality is somewhat harder to see in gay men because even gay men aren't oppressed in the same way and to the extent that women are. But there are inequalities within gay relationships, sometimes economic, sometimes based on differences in intelligence and experience, quite often based on relative psychological vulnerabilities and not infrequently on the basis of differences in physical strength. The variations within any identified group are enough to make any general assertions about the members of that group, increasingly inaccurate.
Some people have noted that the AIDS crisis organized gay men as nothing else ever had. After the idiocy of the fashionable political cant of the 70s was overcome, to some extent, gay communities organized to try to change behavior and stop the transmission of the virus. And that was pretty successful until the idiotic assertion that “AIDS is over” was declared with the availability of drugs to suppress the virus in those who already had it. Though that was a lie, there are about 40,000 new infections in the United States every year, the drugs have major and serious side effects and are expensive and there is no guarantee that the virus won't continue to generate resistant forms that could be even more devastating than the original strains were.
And, as you know, women are infected with HIV through vaginal sex as well as through anal sex by men who are infected. Straight men are often infected through anonymous sex with women or men just as gay men are. I suspect that for many women, who have grown up with the idea that AIDS is primarily a problem for gay men are at the stage gay men were in the early days before the syndrome even had a name.
Of course this is all by way of explanation for my comments on the accusations made about Julian Assange. Being a witness to the deaths of dozens of gay men I knew, knowing that just about all of them with a few exceptions, likely were infected through casual sex with someone they didn't know, knowing that women can be infected by men, all of that informs my thinking on whether or not people should be having casual sex with people they don't know in 2011. And the fact is they shouldn't. Women deserve better than they're going to get from men under those circumstances, men who have sex with men deserve better than they get from it. There is nothing liberated about being infected with HIV or hepatitis or chlamydia or any number of other infections that can injure and kill you. Having sex with someone who can persuade you to engage in sex you don't want or who can trick or force you into it is the opposite of free choice. No more than getting robbed by a conman. And there is no law you can make that will protect you from any of that which is stronger than protecting yourself. And there is nothing that is more likely to protect you than knowing who it is you're agreeing to have sex with.
There is no law that is going to protect you from a good con man who is already in your house or in your bed.
Imagine that these women had sex with a man who was infected with HIV and he was enough of a con artist to convince them to engage in sex without a condom. I would find it hard to believe anyone who doesn't realize that is possible for many if not most women or gay men, especially if they are young and inexperienced. There is no law that is going to protect you from a good con man who is already in your house or in your bed.
I have nieces who I love as well as if they were my daughters, I have nephews who I feel the same way about. I don't want them to have sex with people they don't know because it is dangerous and it leads to a general cheapening of relationships and a decreased respect for other people. I don't want them to grow up feeling coerced into having dangerous and casual sex with people who they have no reason to believe will care about them and have any regard for their well being. The sexual revolution wasn't the right war. The one for equality is. Equality is the supreme political value, with it comes all other rights. Equality is valued less that liberty precisely because it comes with personal obligations to treat other people as you would want to be treated, and more so if you don't think you deserve to be treated well. Only within a culture of the personal restraints required by equality would it be safe to assume that you could engage in casual sex with strangers safely. And even within that, other, culture and with those unavailable assumptions, it would still be risky enough to be unwise if not irresponsible.
* There is a lot of evidence that anal sex wasn't the predominant form of sex among gay men in the United States until the 1970s. There is a large percentage of gay men who don't practice anal sex even today, due to personal preference and in response to HIV. Personally, I didn't and don't and am disgusted at the coercion that gay men often experienced to engage in it has, apparently, become acceptable among young straight people.
** Hagar's treatment in Genesis is pretty standard treatment for slaves. In the story Sarah even suggested it to Abraham as a means of having a son. But the idea that she might have sex with a slave, if it was Abraham who was infertile, doesn't seem to have been seen as an option.
Note: You might want to read this more recent discussion between Gloria Steinem and Suheir Hammad which discusses some of these issues.
Hate Mail - Who Has Money And Who Does Not Is The Key To Understanding How People Really Think When That's Shrouded In Euphemisms
It is rather fascinating how, in these free-speechy, anti-inhibition days that there are strings of euphemisms that one is required to use to cover up the reality of what things really are. And, gosh, wouldn't you just know it, none of those are as de rigueur as those dealing with the most depraved aspects of sex. And, no, rape isn't just "a crime of violence" it is a criminal kind of sex. It is sex as a hate act, it is almost always sex as an act of violent male supremacy, that is as true of gay rape which is, also, a hate act, frequently mixing self-hate with a hatred of the one who can be dominated and harmed for the gratification of the rapist. So, no more of the bull shit that "rape isn't about sex". Things can be about more than one thing at the same time.
No, the people who appear in pornography are not "actors" they are not acting. They're having dirty sex for the titillation and instruction of an audience, most of whom are men and boys who would only find anything like character development, themes and plots got in the way of what they watch it for. The producers and directors and "writers" of porn scripts would probably fire anyone who did any actual acting.
Many of the people you see in porn are forced into it by circumstances, violence or threats of violence, much of what you see on screen and in photos is, actually, rape, the "actors" are rapists and the victim of rape. That is certainly true of the many freely distributed images online in which the person being raped is clearly underage, it is almost as certainly true of many who are compelled to "act" in them.
In these days when the term "rape" has been redefined to mean that someone who drank too much and made a fool of themselves by consenting to have sex with someone can claim to have been "raped", it is incredible that someone who is compelled by a pimp, a director, a producer or someone else to allow themselves to be violently and painfully used in a porn film out of financial desperation or some other form of compulsion isn't, automatically, regarded as the victim of rape. But the opposite is the case and in that I think we can see how the porn industry benefits from the actual attitude towards the victims of porn-prostitution which is mostly a form of rape for profit.
I believe the euphemisms involved are a window into how people really see porn and the people used by it, who are seldom upper class and are certainly not seen as respectable. If a career woman or college woman drinks too much and makes a fool of herself by waking up to realize she has agreed to have sex with a creep, she is now often allowed to call that rape because she is considered respectable. If that's to be allowed then certainly what happens regularly in porn is actual rape. Not infrequently the "actors" in porn movies and photos are led to that form of prostitution through drug addiction or alcoholism or as a result of having been raped and abused in reality instead of current convention. The difference in the terminology, I will maintain, is an aspect of class privilege, and since that is inevitably tied to money, it will be twisted to favor those with the most money. That is the real reason that things have been so twisted in favor of the people who make millions and billions of dollars off of the rape that pornography and prostitution is. That and their ability to hire high-power lawyers who work in the "free speech" industry and other front men who have plastered their propaganda all over the media going back a century.
Just as pointed out, yesterday, the very people who claim to see porn as totally acceptable would certainly never find it acceptable for their children, their grandchildren, their spouse, their parents, and anyone else who they maintained a loving concern for to take up pornography as a job. It's OK for other people, not for their people. So I think the use of euphemisms and the twisting of definitions also expose the hypocrisy of such people who love to think of themselves as pillars of broadminded, enlightened liberality and free-speech, free-press. In the end, it comes down to the same class distinctions that it always has. And that is mostly about money, who is assumed to have it and who is assumed to not have it. Who is assumed to have the potential to have it and the respectability that comes with that and who never will as they are destroyed by those industries.
No, the people who appear in pornography are not "actors" they are not acting. They're having dirty sex for the titillation and instruction of an audience, most of whom are men and boys who would only find anything like character development, themes and plots got in the way of what they watch it for. The producers and directors and "writers" of porn scripts would probably fire anyone who did any actual acting.
Many of the people you see in porn are forced into it by circumstances, violence or threats of violence, much of what you see on screen and in photos is, actually, rape, the "actors" are rapists and the victim of rape. That is certainly true of the many freely distributed images online in which the person being raped is clearly underage, it is almost as certainly true of many who are compelled to "act" in them.
In these days when the term "rape" has been redefined to mean that someone who drank too much and made a fool of themselves by consenting to have sex with someone can claim to have been "raped", it is incredible that someone who is compelled by a pimp, a director, a producer or someone else to allow themselves to be violently and painfully used in a porn film out of financial desperation or some other form of compulsion isn't, automatically, regarded as the victim of rape. But the opposite is the case and in that I think we can see how the porn industry benefits from the actual attitude towards the victims of porn-prostitution which is mostly a form of rape for profit.
I believe the euphemisms involved are a window into how people really see porn and the people used by it, who are seldom upper class and are certainly not seen as respectable. If a career woman or college woman drinks too much and makes a fool of herself by waking up to realize she has agreed to have sex with a creep, she is now often allowed to call that rape because she is considered respectable. If that's to be allowed then certainly what happens regularly in porn is actual rape. Not infrequently the "actors" in porn movies and photos are led to that form of prostitution through drug addiction or alcoholism or as a result of having been raped and abused in reality instead of current convention. The difference in the terminology, I will maintain, is an aspect of class privilege, and since that is inevitably tied to money, it will be twisted to favor those with the most money. That is the real reason that things have been so twisted in favor of the people who make millions and billions of dollars off of the rape that pornography and prostitution is. That and their ability to hire high-power lawyers who work in the "free speech" industry and other front men who have plastered their propaganda all over the media going back a century.
Just as pointed out, yesterday, the very people who claim to see porn as totally acceptable would certainly never find it acceptable for their children, their grandchildren, their spouse, their parents, and anyone else who they maintained a loving concern for to take up pornography as a job. It's OK for other people, not for their people. So I think the use of euphemisms and the twisting of definitions also expose the hypocrisy of such people who love to think of themselves as pillars of broadminded, enlightened liberality and free-speech, free-press. In the end, it comes down to the same class distinctions that it always has. And that is mostly about money, who is assumed to have it and who is assumed to not have it. Who is assumed to have the potential to have it and the respectability that comes with that and who never will as they are destroyed by those industries.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Ari Hoenig - Moment's Notice
Ari Hoening, drums
Chris Potter, tenor sax
Jonathan Kreisberg, guitar
Matt Penaman, bass
I'll believe that pseudo-liberals and media hacks are really OK with porn-prostitution as a valid career choice when they push to have porn producers and pimps at school career days in the prep schools and elite highschools their families attend so their children and grand-children can get recruited by industries they have no problem with the children of poor people being recruited by. I'll believe it when I see them encouraged to recruit at the Phillips Andovers and Grotons and U of C Lab School class of schools.
Go away Stalker Steve, you fatuous phony. I don't care. Go back to the Geritol and Stoli set at the Baby Blue blog and lie to an audience that wants to hear it.
Update: I'd tell you what the Eschatots are apparently claiming but it's so stupid as to be boring. At Duncan's, um, "Brain Trust" they used to say "Smarter trolls, please" now they're too depleted of intelligence to realize they should be saying "Smarter regulars, please". I don't think they have the collective attention span to muster noticing.
Update: I'd tell you what the Eschatots are apparently claiming but it's so stupid as to be boring. At Duncan's, um, "Brain Trust" they used to say "Smarter trolls, please" now they're too depleted of intelligence to realize they should be saying "Smarter regulars, please". I don't think they have the collective attention span to muster noticing.
"Bernie or Bust" Means Bernie Sanders Has Failed To "Move The Discussion To The Left" And The Ivy League Class Of BoBers
The Nation magazine recently had a piece in which four Bernie Sanders supporters said what they would do if their guy didn't get the nomination. Two said that they would never vote for Hillary Clinton, despite both of them acknowledging that a Republican presidency would almost certainly be worse than what they assume a Clinton administration would be like.
Rania Khalek cited Hillary Clinton's record in the middle East, which is certainly mixed as has been that of even the best American presidents all along. No one who is going to be an American president is going to do anything but make some bad decisions in the Middle East, it is certain that Barack Obama who has done some horrible things as president did fewer of those than a president McCain (or Palin, lest that possible and horrific present be forgotten) or Romney. Face it, the Middle East is an ongoing disaster in which the chances of getting it wrong are enormously high. It is a virtual guarantee that someone will take advantage of any action taken by the American president and do evil with it, the most that can be hoped for is a president who is going to make an effort to do less harm.
The other Bernie or Buster was Doug Henwood, a contributing editor. His case was as a professional Hillary Hater. That's not my description, it's his.
I’ve spent much of the last year and a half as a professional anti-Hillaryite for the left. My days are filled with predictable attacks from Clinton supporters, most of whom don’t seem to have read a word I’ve written on the contender from Chappaqua. The attacks broadly fall into two categories. The first involve charges of anti-feminism and misogyny. The mere act of criticizing Hillary Clinton’s political history, her duplicity and penchant for secrecy, and her habit of creating scandals (the inevitable consequence of her duplicity and penchant for secrecy), is an affront to the aspirations of women.
His whine about how he's being persecuted by women and other supporters of Hillary Clinton goes on longer than that. Here is how he builds up to his lofty declaration of principled stupidity.
Another way of phrasing the Ted Cruz question generally goes like this: “Okay, if you think Hillary is so horrible, whom are you going to vote for?” You can answer by listing all the annoying historical and structural constraints that got us here: our constitutionally mandated form of divided and unrepresentative government, consciously designed to frustrate popular power; the semi-official status of the two-party system; the ever-more-dominant role of money in politics; the gatekeeping function of the media, etc. But that will never satisfy the questioner, who wants a firm answer. The exchange often has the feeling (to paraphrase Theodor Adorno) of a cop asking for your papers. So, officer, here’s my answer: I can, in fact, imagine myself voting for Hillary Clinton—but only if David Brock, her nemesis turned promoter, were holding a gun to my head.
Such are the tergiversations of the professional Bernie or Buster to avoid answering the reality that if it's not going to be Bernie Sanders - as it almost certainly is not going to be - the alternative to Hillary Clinton is almost certainly going to be Trump or Cruz or someone who has slightly more palatable table manners but whose policies will be entirely worse than those which Hillary Clinton will put forward.
Apparently the Bernie or Bust crowd believe that their hero has failed in his quest to "move the discussion to the left" if they don't believe that his, grantedly, impressive caucus victories have had that effect which had been the announced intention. If they don't believe that they will have an effect on a President Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party then the excuse for mounting these stunt candidacies is a fraud. I don't think Hillary Clinton is foolish enough to not have learned something about how she would have to govern as president to do better than Barack Obama who didn't learn that lesson. I suspect, if she's lucky enough to get Democratic control of the House and Senate, Hillary Clinton would understand that to do anything she would have to retain that control by supporting candidates for those bodies in a way that Bernie Sanders, and more so, his campaign managers don't seem to understand at all.
In looking into Henwood's background that allows him to ignore what a Republican president will mean for the country and world so he can preen in his pose of Sandersmanian purity, he's a product of Yale, I suspect a child of affluence, though I wasn't able to confirm that. While at Yale he was a conservative, a member of the Yalie "Party of the Right" who went on to work on Wall Street for a while Eventually he went over to the left. He is married to another professional Hillary Hater, Liza Featherstone, (a Columbia product) both of them have authored recent Hillary bashing books, his, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency; hers, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both have lurid images of Hillary Clinton on the cover. Henwood's has a hideous drawing of her pointing a gun at you, things like you used to see on right-wing hit pieces in the 1990s, like something that David Brock wrote before he left the Republican-fascist right for where he is attacked by such play-leftists as Henwood. Obviously, Henwood lacked the practical educational opportunity that a deluded young gay man could face in forcing that conversion. I don't know why he changed but, given his present position, I doubt it was based in a practical consideration of what could be done in the reality we face. Featherstone may have always been leftish, I wasn't able to find as much detail on her.
I don't know what the combined income of the Henwood-Featherstone household is but I am skeptical that it falls far into the middle-class range. I would like to know how much they would be impacted by a Cruz presidency, since that's the possibility that Henwood thinks is worth enduring so he can maintain his pose of leftish purity. I don't know many people who fall into that wealth bracket. I can say that anyone who would want to risk it on behalf of poor folk here, the working poor, the destitute from a relatively affluent life is a jerk.
Rania Khalek cited Hillary Clinton's record in the middle East, which is certainly mixed as has been that of even the best American presidents all along. No one who is going to be an American president is going to do anything but make some bad decisions in the Middle East, it is certain that Barack Obama who has done some horrible things as president did fewer of those than a president McCain (or Palin, lest that possible and horrific present be forgotten) or Romney. Face it, the Middle East is an ongoing disaster in which the chances of getting it wrong are enormously high. It is a virtual guarantee that someone will take advantage of any action taken by the American president and do evil with it, the most that can be hoped for is a president who is going to make an effort to do less harm.
The other Bernie or Buster was Doug Henwood, a contributing editor. His case was as a professional Hillary Hater. That's not my description, it's his.
I’ve spent much of the last year and a half as a professional anti-Hillaryite for the left. My days are filled with predictable attacks from Clinton supporters, most of whom don’t seem to have read a word I’ve written on the contender from Chappaqua. The attacks broadly fall into two categories. The first involve charges of anti-feminism and misogyny. The mere act of criticizing Hillary Clinton’s political history, her duplicity and penchant for secrecy, and her habit of creating scandals (the inevitable consequence of her duplicity and penchant for secrecy), is an affront to the aspirations of women.
His whine about how he's being persecuted by women and other supporters of Hillary Clinton goes on longer than that. Here is how he builds up to his lofty declaration of principled stupidity.
Another way of phrasing the Ted Cruz question generally goes like this: “Okay, if you think Hillary is so horrible, whom are you going to vote for?” You can answer by listing all the annoying historical and structural constraints that got us here: our constitutionally mandated form of divided and unrepresentative government, consciously designed to frustrate popular power; the semi-official status of the two-party system; the ever-more-dominant role of money in politics; the gatekeeping function of the media, etc. But that will never satisfy the questioner, who wants a firm answer. The exchange often has the feeling (to paraphrase Theodor Adorno) of a cop asking for your papers. So, officer, here’s my answer: I can, in fact, imagine myself voting for Hillary Clinton—but only if David Brock, her nemesis turned promoter, were holding a gun to my head.
Such are the tergiversations of the professional Bernie or Buster to avoid answering the reality that if it's not going to be Bernie Sanders - as it almost certainly is not going to be - the alternative to Hillary Clinton is almost certainly going to be Trump or Cruz or someone who has slightly more palatable table manners but whose policies will be entirely worse than those which Hillary Clinton will put forward.
Apparently the Bernie or Bust crowd believe that their hero has failed in his quest to "move the discussion to the left" if they don't believe that his, grantedly, impressive caucus victories have had that effect which had been the announced intention. If they don't believe that they will have an effect on a President Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party then the excuse for mounting these stunt candidacies is a fraud. I don't think Hillary Clinton is foolish enough to not have learned something about how she would have to govern as president to do better than Barack Obama who didn't learn that lesson. I suspect, if she's lucky enough to get Democratic control of the House and Senate, Hillary Clinton would understand that to do anything she would have to retain that control by supporting candidates for those bodies in a way that Bernie Sanders, and more so, his campaign managers don't seem to understand at all.
In looking into Henwood's background that allows him to ignore what a Republican president will mean for the country and world so he can preen in his pose of Sandersmanian purity, he's a product of Yale, I suspect a child of affluence, though I wasn't able to confirm that. While at Yale he was a conservative, a member of the Yalie "Party of the Right" who went on to work on Wall Street for a while Eventually he went over to the left. He is married to another professional Hillary Hater, Liza Featherstone, (a Columbia product) both of them have authored recent Hillary bashing books, his, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency; hers, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both have lurid images of Hillary Clinton on the cover. Henwood's has a hideous drawing of her pointing a gun at you, things like you used to see on right-wing hit pieces in the 1990s, like something that David Brock wrote before he left the Republican-fascist right for where he is attacked by such play-leftists as Henwood. Obviously, Henwood lacked the practical educational opportunity that a deluded young gay man could face in forcing that conversion. I don't know why he changed but, given his present position, I doubt it was based in a practical consideration of what could be done in the reality we face. Featherstone may have always been leftish, I wasn't able to find as much detail on her.
I don't know what the combined income of the Henwood-Featherstone household is but I am skeptical that it falls far into the middle-class range. I would like to know how much they would be impacted by a Cruz presidency, since that's the possibility that Henwood thinks is worth enduring so he can maintain his pose of leftish purity. I don't know many people who fall into that wealth bracket. I can say that anyone who would want to risk it on behalf of poor folk here, the working poor, the destitute from a relatively affluent life is a jerk.
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