A Feud?

Feud?  

Thinking about the accusation that I'm carrying out a feud with some of Duncan Black's rump of contented cootsters, his community of conventional college-credentialed kewelsters, cosseted from self-critical controversy, never left their college-days behind play-lefties.  No, I figure you've got to have evenly matched sides for a feud, they're not up to feuding with me.

 I'm just using them for my own purposes.  To paraphrase dear old Bucky Fuller, don't fight farces, use them, in the words of the great Carla Bley, "Don't just stand there takin' abuse, you got to put it to use." 

If they never mentioned me again, if Duncan deleted any mention of me from his blog you would never read a word about any of them here from then on.   Though there are people who say they find me mopping the floor with Simps funny. 

I suspect something like keeping his blog honest is more work than Boy Duncan wants to put into it.   I see he has ads that ad-block doesn't block, so I won't be linking to him, anymore. 

Same Set Kwetch

{x | x = the boroughs of New York City}

Simps is still going on and on and on and on about me dishonoring the place on earth he fully believes has the honor of having him park his flabby old ass on it by noting that it is only one of the boroughs of New York City, a conceit he must share with some of the stupider manhole covers and some of his equally math illiterate fellow graduates of private degree mills there.  He believes that Queens cannot be an element of a set or a subset of a set because he holds it is not an "abstraction".  I would point out to him that counting it as one of the borroughs of New York city is as valid a mathemathematical operation as counting the thirteen original colonies or the people in an elevator or anything else, the people in the elevator in those examples the only members of a set which weren't "abstractions".  If Queens were to be split in two by law or if it were absorbed into a different form of government, it would cease to exist as it is now without anything really changing about it.  It's been well over a century that most mathematicians have considered Set Theory to provide the theoretical foundation of mathematics, though it's too early in the morning for me to call my friend who would be able to confirm that point. 

I was originally tempted to tease the Simp by saying he figures he's the Georg Cantor of his generation.  But he wouldn't know what that meant.  Or maybe he figures that would be because political entities are known by the boundary lines that naturally occur on the ground and on water like on a map.   He really does think like a Trump. 

I was tempted to do some work on this, so I looked for my copy of "Sets, Relations and Functions"* but couldn't find where I misshelved it and figured, why bother?  So I reached for a resource I figured at least tried to get things down nearer to his level, the "For Dummies" franchise. From the online version of Basic Math and Pre-Algebra For Dummies by Mark Zegareli.

The things contained in a set are called elements (also known as members). Consider these two sets: {Empire State Building, Eiffel Tower, Roman Colosseum} and {Albert Einstein’s intelligence, Marilyn Monroe’s talent, Joe DiMaggio’s athletic ability, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s ruthlessness}.

Why stop there?  Simp's ignorance, Trump's, Mike Teevee's . . . 

The Eiffel Tower is an element of A, and Marilyn Monroe’s talent is an element of B. You can write these statements using a symbol that means “is an element of”:


However, the Eiffel Tower is not an element of B. You can write this statement using a symbol that means “is not an element of”:



These two symbols become more common as you move higher in your study of math.

I think that last sentence is entirely too optimistic in the case of the Simp.  You may as well try to teach it to  Trump, who may still count as an element of the set of the Idiots of Queens, if you define it the right way, It's sad when it's clear that even this level of elementary logic and mathematics is too much for college grads in their 70s to  have mastered.  But, to quote the Ooompa Loompas "What do you get from a glut of TV?  A pain in the neck and an IQ of 3".   It's too late for him but for you parents out there:

*  I'll tell you a funny story about that book.  It was back at a family party, I think it was the Labor Day one, when I was taking care of my two youngest nieces, after school.  They were constantly asking me to read them the Harry Potter books.  I ended up reading all of them to them, some of them several times.   

Anyway, sitting at the long table at the party among my very old mother, a brother's almost as old mother-in-law, several of my siblings, one of those nieces was badgering me to read one of  the Harry Potter books and I was getting kind of tired of it so among the chattering and babbling around the table, I said,  How about I read you another book, 

Which one? she demanded,

Oh, I don't know, how about "Sets, Relations and Functions."  A joke between us because I'd proposed several other math titles on my shelf other times she was demanding I read Harry Potter to her.  Math not being her best subject.  

But the joke was on me that time because I quickly found out if you don't pronounce that particular title, very clearly in mixed company, it can be easily misconstrued.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama -Created by Atticus Jackson & Henry Galley - Congeria

Congeria 

I am mostly a fan of drama that imitates real life, I'm not a huge fan of scifi, fantasy, steam punk, dystopian fantasy, etc.  But I know there are lots of people who love those things.  You can tell because it's inevitable that any "best of" lists will contain mostly things that go into those categories.  I decided, this week, to look over the many "best of 2019 drama podcast" lists and, after listening to several I wouldn't post, chose this one, though I have only listened to the first episode.  You might like it.  It's got a lot more profanity than most of what I post. 

The Ballad of Claire DuBois Part 1

Created by Atticus Jackson & Henry Galley
Executive Producer: David Cummings
Production and Sound Design: Phil Michalski
Music: Brandon Boone
Episode Art: Charlie Cody
Written by Henry Galley, Gabrielle Loux & Maxwell Malone

Cast:
Jenny Walker - Erin Lillis
Andrea DuBois - Jessica McEvoy
Frank DuBois - Elie Hirschman
Claire DuBois - Nichole Goodnight
Ronnie Mendez - Mike Delgaudio
Angela Graves - Alexis Bristowe
Wilson Novac - James Cleveland
Graham Sharpe - David Ault
Glenn Rhodes - Scott Thomas (Harbinger)
Wayne Myres - David Cummings
Max - Atticus Jackson
Barkeep - Dan Zappulla
Stoner - Ru$$ Money
Lady #1 - Jes Echo
Lady #2 -Michelle Anderson


The Congeria Outro Theme was written and performed by Phil Michalski, with lyrics written by Alex Aldea, and performed by Camila Recchio

With Special Thanks to David Cummings and Alex Aldea

"No One Is Attacking Boas"

Well, looking online for recent discussion of Franz Boas I found this at Jstor  The Cult of Franz Boas and his "Conspiracy" to Destroy the White Race  by L. D. Baker, from 2010.   It begins with a crypto-Nazi magazine article from 1997, fifty-five years after Boas died, which lists him as #12 in a list of those who have "Damaged White Interests" a list that begins with Lyndon Johnson, the president who did more than any to advance racial and ethnic and religious equality.  It's such an interesting list, matched with a list in a parallel column of "Those Who Have Advanced White Interests" which I may go over in a different piece - or not, I don't have the time to write everything I'd really love to, I've got to earn a living.

I haven't read the paper, it's behind a wall I cannot afford to breach, I believe it is a discussion of the kinds of attacks on Boas such as I mentioned and not an attack, though I haven't read it.  

Here is, unfortunately, a more recent attack from the Nazish Frank Hilliard, in an April, 2016 piece entitled, The Alternative Right Belongs To The Darwinians [Note, I do not link to Nazi websites or their allies]. 

All of which means nothing to most people because if they express an interest in the Alt-Right they’re afraid they’ll be accused of racism. This is a real tar baby in modern discussions on race, even for physical anthropologists who have shied away from making comments on the subject because of the influence of Columbia University physical anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942). Boas, whose grandparents were observant Jews, turned the discipline from the study of biology into the study of culture, claiming humans could be changed by social and environmental factors and downplaying the role of genetic inheritance.

However, as I’ve just shown, culture is downstream from biology just as law is downstream from culture. To claim otherwise is to confuse cause and effect. Indeed much of the failure of modern day social programs can be laid at the feet of Boas’ followers, from the Great Society, to school busing programs, to demolished public housing complexes in St. Louis and Chicago. None of these programs worked because none of them dealt with the root cause of the problem.

Surely, after 75 years of failure, someone somewhere needs to return anthropology — the study of humans — to studying humans as the animals we are. We need to study humans at least as well as we do dogs, sheep, cattle or horses. We need categories, we need statistics, we need to establish (actually re-establish) the relationship between these categories and their social and cultural by-products.

Note that he, as in my first post of the day, cites the same decades of failure of the would-be scientific study of these topics as a reason to adopt the racism of Darwinism, of which, in the same piece he says,

There are two views of human development: those of the Darwinians and those of the Progressives. We in the Alternative Right belong to the Darwinians because we believe in science, the scientific method, and the value of observation and analysis. The Progressives, on the other hand, are repelled by their observations of the human condition and attempt to replace science with a belief system they can manipulate. Progressives are Utopians; while we on the Alt-Right are Realists.

I will remind you, again, that the Nazis claimed the same thing for Nazism, that it was merely "applied biology" and I will remind you of what I said the other day about Darwin, by his own declaration, said his theory of natural selection was founded in the political-economic theories of Thomas Malthus which were absolutely founded in the same economic and class inequalites that were created by the entirely artificial laws drawn up for the benefit of, first the English, then the British elites underlying the British class system and such ancillary components of that as the Poor Law (to be expanded under the influence of such "science" into the even worse New Poor Law) the semi-enslaved legal status of peasants, etc. It was inevitable that such as became Nazis and neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc. would adopt it because Darwinism, as Marx correctly noted, framed the entirety of biology with the British class system. 

Hillairds' use of science, those who he attacks for not hewing to the line of Darwinism - many of whom just happen to be Jews, what a coincidence - is not very different from the kind of cleaned up attacks made by Darwinists in science against their fellow scientists, many of whom are, as well, convinced of the reality of natural selection. 

He also says:

Why we believe in these policies is very interesting. It’s because, as Darwinians, we think the nation should exist as a gene pool, since we come from a European background, a European gene pool. We think the same argument should apply to other ethnic and racial groups. Thus, we support the Kurds in their demand for a country of their own. We support Israel as a land for the Jews, Japan as a land for the Japanese, Congo for the Congolese, and so on. Each race/ethnic group is like an extended family for the people in it, and this large extended family should have a home of its own. Again, this used to be standard fare for Classical liberals, but again it has fallen into disfavor.

I will remind you of the 1925 paper of the major figure in the history of Darwinism, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul, a paper whose antisemtic science was, we know, cited in Nazi scientific literature in regard to their "eastern policy" in the years leading up to the Einsatzgruppen beginning the mass murder of Polish and Russian Jews and Slavs, was pretty much expressing the same conclusions.  It was Darwin, in the letter to G. A. Gaskell who went to the logical conclusion of natural selection in proclaiming that the British imperialist genocide would be a boon to the world.  Look in my Archive, I posted their entire correspondence.  

Beyond the many examples of very recent rounds of kicking around the remains of Franz Boaz, I could, literally, give you dozens and dozens of things said by people such as the author of the neo-Nazi mass killer's manual, The Turner Diaries, William Pierce (#11 on the "good" list cited by Baker, as mentioned above) and more genteel echos of the same by others on that list, Arthur Jensen #10 (whose scientific racism had the full and active support of Francis Crick, as documented in letters to his scientific colleagues, and I am sure other Darwinist racists and eugenicists) Charles Murray, author of the Bell Curve, #14 on the list, and the Nobel Prizewinning physicist William Shockley who, when he was on a media tour promoting his Darwinist racism and his Nobel Prize winner Stud Farm scam was told, I believe by Richard Lewontin, that by the age at which Nobels are given out the sperm of such donors was likely so riddled with mutations that it would probably produce monsters, as, in fact, Darwinism has.   I guess the Nobeled physicist didn't take that rather well evidenced finding of genetics into account.   It is certainly something that is better evidenced than natural selection and the scientific and class-based bigotry it is founded in as well as, unsurprisingly, supportive of. 

PS.  I forgot that I meant to point out that this claim by Hilliard - "We need to study humans at least as well as we do dogs, sheep, cattle or horses." is a variation of something both Charles Darwin claimed in On the Origin of Species and, again, in The Descent of Man, that the entirely artificial practice of animal husbandry could teach us something about the workings of nature, something taken up over and over again by Darwinists in their eugenic claims, including his son Leonard Darwin who was saying the same thing as he was bemoaning Germans under the Weimar government refusing to institute eugenics,  something which in April 1939 he said with satisfaction had turned around in the Nazi eugenic laws of 1935.  

The idea that animal husbandry can reveal anything of knowable validity about how evolution happened is an enormous leap of faith that refuses to see many of the problems with that attempt, among those that the characteristics bred for, in many cases, renders the poor animals that result dependent on the artifices of human care to survive or thrive as opposed to animals of the same species allowed to breed themselves.  It is pretty astonishing that such a ridiculous line of claims could be claimed to produce enhanced "fitness" or some kind of biological superiority.  I don't know, maybe most of those who bought it never really had that much familiarity with animals on a farm. 

Update:  "You don't know what you're talking about."  

I would invite anyone to read my archive of pieces on these topics, search "darwin", "darwinism" "eugenics" "natural selection" etc.   I don't think someone would read what I've written would honestly say I've written hastily on opinion instead of citation of the primary documents.  Of course, that's not going to stop anyone who wants to lie from lying. 

The Illusion of Objective Knowledge Without The Possibility Of Seeing

Definition of phenomenon
1plural phenomena : an observable fact or event
2plural phenomena
a: an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition
b: a temporal or spatiotemporal object of sensory experience as distinguished from a noumenon
c: a fact or event of scientific interest susceptible to scientific description and explanation
3a: a rare or significant fact or event

b plural phenomenons : an exceptional, unusual, or abnormal person, thing, or occurrence

Merriam Webster online

Here is a passage from a book by two of the most widely respected of those who invented and defined evolutionary psychology,  Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

Not only have the social sciences been unusual in their self-conscious stance of intellectual autarky [I'd have just said, "independence" and saved you looking it up] but, significantly, they have also been relatively unsuccessful as sciences.  

I will break in here to note that this is entirely in line with my assertion that when you try to use the methods of science, proper, that are so successful in studying relatively simple phenomena in physics and chemistry to study far more complex and variable phenomena, their success is bound to weaken and eventually fail. I think that even in biology, where the physical systems are far more complex but not too complex - and only when the phenomena are really phenomena, having the most basic requirement of something to be a phenomenon, THE ABILITY TO OBSERVE IT DIRECTLY OR IN RELIABLE INDIRECT WAYS - scientific methods have much or some, though not always in every case, validity.  I think when you can't observe something those methods of science break down pretty fast.  Which would account for the "relatively unsuccessful"* social sciences, even when they assemble what they call "data" and process those with valid methods of mathematical analysis, giving it a heavy gloss coat of seeming science.  The reliability of the numberwork is directly related to the quality and completeness of the data they reference.   And honesty.  Whenever that data is in the form of humanreporting, as almost all of it is, you can't tell if you're  counting a lie as a truth, a false or mistaken answer as representing something real. There's no way to know that, so the enterprise of the social sciences is largely based on an unsound practice. 

I think that what is most telling about the histories of such overly complex attempts to construct sciences is the frequency of scientists seeing what they want to see, of imagining what they want to be there when they really can't see anything, up to and including generalized framings by which things are to be clarified.   That's one of the things about frames, they only contain what you can put in them. 

Although they were founded in the 18th and 19th centuries amid every expectation that they would soon produce intellectual discoveries, grand "laws," and validated theories to rival those of the rest of science,  such success has remained elusive.  The recent wave of antiscientific sentiment spreading through the social sciences draws much of its appeal from this endemic failure.  This disconnection from the rest of science has left a hole in the fabric of our organized knowledge of the world where the human sciences should be.  After more than a century, the social sciences are still adrift, with an enormous mass of half-digested observations, a not inconsiderable body of empirical generalizations, and a contradictory stew of ungrounded, middle-level theories expressed in a babel of incommensurate technical lexicons.  This is accompanied by a growing malaise, so that the single largest trend toward rejecting the scientific enterprise as it applies to humans.  

Well, yeah, after a couple of centuries of constructing imaginary cathedrals and cities only to see one after another of them come down, you kind of get the sense that you're barking up the wrong tree. 

We suggest that this lack of progress, this "failure to thrive," has been caused by the failure of the social sciences to explore or accept their logical connections to the rest of the body of science - that is, to casually locate their objects to study inside the larger network of scientific knowledge.  Instead of the scientific enterprise, what should be jettisoned is what we will call the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM);  The consensus view of the nature of social and cultural phenomena that has served for a century as the intellectual framework for the organization of psychology and the social sciences and the intellectual justification of their claims of autonomy from the rest of science.  Progress has been severely limited because the Standard Social Science Model mischaracterizes important avenues of causation, induces researchers to study complexly chaotic an unordered phenomena, and misdirects study away from areas where rich principled phenomena are to be found.  In place of the Standard Social Science Model, there is emerging a new framework that we will call the Integrated Causal Model. 

You might notice that after asserting the non-success of a widely adopted model in the social sciences that has failed - I agree it has failed -  Cosmides and Tooby, and the rest of the Sociobiology-Evolutionary Psychology crowd REPLACE IT WITH ANOTHER IMAGINARY FRAMING THAT IS FAR MORE COMPLEX AND ATTENUATED THAN THE ONE IT REPLACES.  

This alternative framework makes progress possible by accepting and exploiting the natural connections that exist among all the branches of science, using them to construct careful analyses of the causal interplay among all the factors that bear on a phenomenon.  In this alternative framework, nothing is autonomous and all of the components of the model must mesh. 

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby:  The Adapted Mind:  Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture 

Look at that last claim first, that "all of the components of the model must mesh" because I think it is the overarching motive of the entire enterprise of declaring Darwinism, natural selection, MUST BE TRUE, because without it the scientific study of the phenomenon of the evolution of species and the diversity of life on Earth, can't be pretended to have an overarching completeness, an overarching explanation for everything - it is the biological theory of everything, in this view of it which has become the standard model. 

I think the ability of those doing such science to declare that it "makes progress possible" is the typical folly of the social sciences and of natural selection.  I remember one of my teachers in college, when someone, me, complained that I couldn't make something work the way I'd wanted it to pointing out that no matter how much I wanted it, it was just too bad, it didn't work.  Goes for entire branches of knowledge, look at Ptolemaic cosmology or all of those assertions of the social sciences that litter the boneyard of discontinued science.  You would think that the scientific study of evolution, OF ALL BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE, which study about the biggest of all boneyards full of extinct species, would be ready to admit when an overreaching framing has failed.  But, no, they haven't learned that from their study. 

What I think is so telling about the desire of people like Cosmides and Tooby to use a crude and already outdated vintage of Darwinism to rescue the social sciences from the consequences of pretending you can study such occult and unobservable and massively complex "phenomena" such as human culture, human behavior - individually and, in its ultimately attenuated forms, socially and even to declare generalities over the entire species is that they take an alleged explanation for an effectively more enormous, more complex and more unobservable and opaque phenomenon, the evolution of all life on Earth, an explanation that incorporates all of the problems of the allegedly scientific study of behavior and society and minds and magnifies them by hundreds of millions of species over billions of years of which the most scant of traces of a vanishingly small number of effectively randomly preserved bits of often very low resolution artifacts are the only evidence.  And such "evidence" often cannot develop claims that are really "evident" never mind capable of constructing durable general principles.  

But a framing that has been the enforced, approved way to explain things about biological evolution.  I think it is in the political success of that enforced orthodoxy that made it irresistible for the social sciences to latch onto natural selection.  And it was a symbiotic relationship because evolutionary biologists latch onto the alleged findings of evolutionary psychology - such as Hamiltonian "altruism" - as evidence of natural selection.  I think all of it is an illusion. 

I think the claimed integration of knowledge in both of those academic endeavors, the the attempt to come to generalized understandings of them, theories of effectively everything about these extremely complex and largely unobervable entities - I'm not even sure evolution or "human behavior" meet the criteria to be legitimately called "phenomena" as big, varied and unobservable as those are - have the kind of orderly structure that is claimed about them.  I think that sense of structure is largely a self-fulfilling, desired illusion.  One which, through a combination of their shared desires, their ambitions for their professions and their ability to enforce a false consensus about it within their professions, is asserted to be what it isn't, reliably known or even reliably knowable.  

*  I would point out that their "relative unsuccess" is only relative to some of the least successful branches of real science, such as those which study very complex, very varied pheonemena.   Like human nutrition, the study of very varied diets on organisms of great complexity and not a little variety, changing over relatively long lifespans.  Think about that the next time the news has some claim of overturning some previous study in that area. 

Stupy, I wasted yesterday on you, I'm not wasting today on someone who doesn't understand sets and those subsets that are elements of larger sets. Go back to 7th grade, if they're not teaching that stuff even earlier now.  I can't imagine how you ever got through Algebra 1, week 1, though maybe my small, rural high-school had better math teachers than your urban one did.  You've always been a very young 12, going on 2.  It's hilarious in someone six times that. 

Update:  Stupy, your best friend won't tell you but you're a schmuck.    And that's what your best friend thinks of you, too. 

Ah, Yes, The Old Tactic Of Playing The "Politics" Card

It is asserted that I'm against Darwinism "because you blame it for the Holocaust,"  that my objections are founded in "politics" and not science and, therefore my arguments against the existence or validity of natural selection are to be rejected.  

Starting by noting that you don't refute a single point I made, in a number of different lines of argument to attack natural selection, and I've made a number of those, I wonder why it is you would not attack my arguments by refuting them.  Perhaps that would be because you can't. 

Among those arguments is the fact that natural selection, founded by Charles Darwin's own declaration on his reading of the political-economic theories of Thomas Malthus, is a theory of science which partakes of political-economics, which, alone, invalidates your argument.   

If my political preferences can be cited to refute my points, the clear preference of Charles Darwin, a member of the British elite, in choosing to believe Thomas Malthus's unfounded and rather sloppy political-economic theory which favors Darwin's class interest is certainly a definitive disqualification of natural selection as a valid theory having the status of reliable science. 

You don't get to claim that such a type of argument is valid when you like the result and, then, make use of its claimed disqualification to invalidate a result that you don't like.  Though that is a basic rule of logic that gets disposed of quite often in the cultural reality of science through scientists proclaiming that they are above such uses of personal preference, personal economic interest, personal class interest, ideological preference, political ideology, etc.  Science, as it exists in the real world, instead of in the imaginary non-reality of theoretical purity, is as full of such lapses as any other human field of thought. 

Being a somewhat informal student of the literature of biological dispute, I will note that I have seen your tactic used against scientists whose political preferences are defined - however that is done at any time - as "left of center".  It was the tactic used to attack the early 20th century anthropologist Franz Boas in regard to what were asserted was his insufficient hewing to the Darwinist line that the one making the accusation asserted was the true one, a use of Boas that continued into fairly recent times, decades after his death.  It was the one used by E. O. Wilson and other scientists who supported, first, his 1970s Darwinian fundamentalism, Sociobiology, and the form of that popularized by Richard Dawkins soon after, Evolutionary Psychology against their critics, especially the eminent geneticist Richard Lewontin and the eminent palentologist, Stephen Jay Gould, who were held to be discredited due to an accusation made in the case of Boas, that they were "Marxists".  If I had to choose sides, I'd not hesitate to prefer Lewontin, Gould and Boas, but I really don't see any need to.  As a personal aside, I always saw that line of Darwinist fundamentalist invective as having a distinct odor of antisemitism to it.  The use of the most crass forms of dirty politics has never been absent from the culture of science, no matter how much scientists pretend to be above that by virtue of their higher sciencyness. 

It is, of course also invalidated by the glaring fact that Darwinists, from the time of Charles Darwin have made claims in regard to politics, the law, economic policy, social policy, educational policy, generally on the side of favoring permitted or even enforced inequality in all of them on the basis of the theory of natural selection.  It is inevitable that a theory of science based on the class-interested political-economic theories of the British aristocratic Malthus would have that as an essential component of it.  

That was something that began immediately, on the testimony of Francis Galton who proclaimed that his eugenics sprang from his reading of On The Origin of Species and whose experience was clearly matched by that of Wilhelm Schallmeyer (on his own testimony) that of Ernst Haeckel, George Darwin, Leonard Darwin, etc.  and of the entire line of eugenicists who based their eugenics on the theory of natural selection.  During his lifetime we have Darwin, himself making claims about economics, the law, social policy, medical policy, even in matters such as capital punishment based on his own theory. 

If the claim is made that sullying the purity of science with the distasteful thing that politics is held to be, by comparison, is to invalidate arguments made, then Darwinism would have to pretty much all go because from the start and continuing on till today, it had its origin in political ideology and it continues to insert itself directly into politics and economics, etc.  You can hardly read a magazine, listen to the radio or TV without Darwinism being used to advocate political, economic, or social policy, to reinforce racial and ethnic inequality, economic class inequality, even - with complete irrationality - gender inequality, something that ol' Chuck and his bulldog, Thomas Huxley did when it was totally incoherent in terms of what they claimed. 

I have to say my first reaction to the comment was that the Shoah and all of the the biologically motivated murders of the Nazis is about the most valid test of a biological theory that it is possible for an idea to be given in human culture and in human history.  It is certainly relevant to cite in testing the effect of that theory in reality as opposed to in imaginary conjecture and false, post-WWII PR. 

If we are not to learn lessons from such a thing so recent, so documented, so explained in the stated motives of those who did it, the totally imagined natural history, the "just-so stories" which may well not exist anywhere except within the imaginations of those who like natural selection that comprise the entirety of assertions made about natural selection in the lost, unobservable past and, by a gargantuan proportion the "evidence" used to support its existence are certainly not valid in coming to conclusions about its existence.  Only, I'd point out, we know the biological murders were motivated by the belief in natural selection by the Nazis and, before them, the general culture of the German elite, many of whom became Nazis.  That is fully documented, the just-so stories of the lost past aren't.  Which one would you say was more valid in using to come to a conclusion as to what is supportable and what isn't? 

Update:  I have never been a Marxist though I think Marx's critique of capitalism is one of the most brilliant things ever called "economics,"  He was a great diagnostician but his prescription was one of the most catastrophically bad ones made in human history. 

I have called myself a "socialist" in the past though, as I've written here, I think the word has been so distorted and twisted and shattered as to meaning that I think the word and most of what has been called "socialism" should be scrapped.   Seeing how they are behaving since 2015 in American politics and British politics, I would include that variety that goes by the name "democratic socialism" as well.  They're going to help no one but Republican-fascism and Brit-fascism.   Socialism, take your pick as to which one, doesn't do it for me anymore.  It's not egalitarian, or just or radical enough. 

I have, also, since reading the essays of Marilynne Robinson on the topic, come to understand that the economics of The Law, the Prophets and the Gospel is far, far more radical and just than any secular political economics.  That's where I'm coming from, now. 

Mr NYC Apparently Doesn't Know Shit About The Place

I have decided to go with the evidence of just how stupid my stupidest and most obsessive compulsive troll is because it's a wasted day, now, anyway.

In his bid to FUCKIN' PROVE THAT QUEENS IS UNIQUE, MAN!  he has fallen onto the argument that Queens has a borough president and a district attorney.  I quote, "I guess the Queens borough president and the Queens District Attorney don't actually exist then. Interesting."  

Simp's comments often have a lot in common with Trump's tweets.  I suppose it's because they they both think like 2-year-olds. 

I guess it didn't occur to him to see if the other boroughs had those officers, as well, here's what I found in a search for "borough presidents of new york city"

The current borough presidents were either elected or re-elected in the most recent election in 2017:

Rubén Díaz Jr. (Democrat) of The Bronx (since 2009)
Eric Adams. (Democrat) of Brooklyn (since 2014)
Gale Brewer. (Democrat) of Manhattan (since 2014)
Melinda Katz. (Democrat) of Queens (since 2014)
James Oddo. (Republican) Staten Island (since 2014)

And, though I didn't find a list I could just copy and paste in about ten seconds, I found the current DAs of all of the boroughs by easy web search, some of whom I'm kind of stunned that the stunned one has never heard of before sittin' down there with his ass  on the actual Center of His Universe.  I've heard of at least four of them not having been there in decades. 

Darcel D Clark is the DA for the Bronx
Eric Gonzalez is the DA for Brooklyn
Cy Vance, Jr is the Manhattan DA (I'd have thought even an idiot like Simps has heard of him or his father or the famous man he replaced, Robert Morgenthau.) 
Melinda Katz is the DA for Queens
Michael McMahon is the Staten Island DA

I think the only one I haven't heard of before is Eric Gonzalez, though I don't know why that would have been.  Maybe he's been in the news and I just didn't remember the name. 

Update:  By the way, I don't know why Melinda Katz is still listed as both the borough president and the DA online.  The actual occupant of the office isn't dispositive for my point. 

Update 2:  Oh, and, since I cribbed the first list from Simp's idea of the ultimate intellectual authority, other than himself and whatever scribbler of pop criticism he's cribbing at the time,  Wikipedia,  here's a sentence from their description of the current powers of the borough presidents of NYC.

A Borough president is an elective office in each of the five boroughs of New York City. For most of the city's history, the office exercised significant executive powers within each borough, and the five borough presidents also sat on the New York City Board of Estimate. Since 1990, the borough presidents have been stripped of a majority of their powers in the government of New York City.

I'll Bet They Didn't Count On A Percentage Who Would Choose To Be "Don't Bees" Like Trump and Simps

The Popular (Kids) Understanding Of Science

The ongoing controversy over my dissing of what is, apparently, the atheist-secular-groovy-scientistic crowd's latest sacred cow, tattooing, is hilarious.  

Apparently these champions of the sciency and something I'm sure they would call "reason" hold that I wasn't supposed to learn anything when I read that 2011 Scientific American article about the health hazards of tattooing, including exposure to known carcinogens in the ink being injected under poeples' skin, permanently, and the article listing a number of the diseases you can get from being punctured with a dirty needle, including those known to include the development of some of the most deadly of cancers,hepatitis B and C and HIV.  

I knew about the cancer causing properties of cadmium and arsenic because, you know, scientists had studied them and found them to be carcinogenic.  I also remember that getting them listed as hazardous substances to be treated as such by industry was not an easy thing back during the Reagan and Bush I years, as I recall.  Perhaps they were too busy with pop music and 80s movies to remember.  As to the diseases, I was paying, perhaps, closer attention to what the scientists and medical professionals were saying about the consequences of both forms of hepatitis before and during the AIDS epidemic than these champions of science and public health, though as I found out when you mix the pubic into issues of public health, the very same people will go totally stupid, as well.*

Apparently the college-credentialed champions of science at Eschaton hold that the greater good is following a fad which an ever larger and irresponsible industry benefited from.

It's too bad that I can't post the hilarious comments of Simels in which he accuses me of mathematical illiteracy because I corrected him on a fairly simple logical consequence of set theory, that a subset of a larger set cannot have more elements than the larger set does,  his claim that Queens can be more diverse than the New York City it is a mere borough of.  I'm surprised that his great admirer Grandmere Poisson hasn't corrected him on that one. 

He also proves his illiteracy by attributing a passage from a Pew report which I cited and set off in the typical bold italics I use when I am directly quoting something as something I said.  

I have to conclude that the amount of grade inflation they practiced in private colleges in the late 60s and 70s in order to pretend those raised on American TV had been educated was more serious than I'd realized, as a grad of Land Grant universities.  It's clear that Simps was credentialed but never learned the most simple of things and, apparently, he, his fellow Eschatots, his host, the wider world of play-lefty leftism have never learned a thing since their credentials were granted.  

Tattooing strikes me as a typical cause celebre among the college-credentialed white, play-left, it is stupid,it is a contradiction of other stands they take, it is dangerous, it is expensive, it is an absurd fashion statement, the kind of "individualism" that consists of following the fad, it is something that benefits an amoral and irresponsible set of industries and shady businesses - which real liberalism would probably regulate to make a lot less dangerous but that won't happen because, you know "freedom of expression" - and I could go on and on and on.  It's not unlike the entirely stupid, decades long campaign to keep public property free of manger scenes which benfitted Republican-fascists over something that was a complete and utter waste of time, resources and attention.  Though it helped clarify my thoughts on the total idiocy and futile counter-productivity of the college-credentialed, white, middle to upper-class, play left. 

I wish the old Haloscan comment threads were still up so I can see how many of them were ga-ga over Richard Dawkins when he was groovy, back in the 00's.  Clearly the first Oxford Chair for The Public Understanding Of Science, failed in his mission - and among some of his biggest fan guys and gals - though,as I've been pointing out the last few days,  Dawkins' is the kind of understanding of science these idiots have.  

Have I mentioned that Dawkins' great inspiration in his selfish-gene science, W. D. Hamilton died as a result of his own anti-vax quest to prove that HIV had started in a polio vaccination program in Africa?  The ass, frustrated that peer reviewed journals wouldn't publish his speculations, went to Congo to find evidence, didn't find it, and caught Malaria which ended up killing the ass.   I have to wonder if it wasn't a personal thing he had against a specific scientist, a far more accomplished one, whose work in virology and immunology probably saved millions of lives.  I may get around to seeing if I can find evidence to support my speculation, it's what I was taught to do, not in college, in sixth grade in public school, when we were assigned to write our first practice research paper.  Apparently they didn't teach that in the more "progressive" schools that Duncan and the Eschatots attended. 

*  Just last week at Echidne's I had occasion to remember when I set off a fury at Salon and Alternet by pointing out that even as they had multiple articles up slamming, correctly, anti-vaxxers for putting people at risk of being infected with life threatening diseases, they had up articles encouraging the then new thing among hetero-sexual kewelsters, anal oral sex which did exactly the same thing they were slamming the anti-vaxxers for, only the exposure was far more likely.  I could have pointed out that if it were the meat industry irresponsibly exposing people to such things as e-coli they would be doing a back double flip to cover all of the positions they were advocating at once. 

Update:  "You're the scientific illiterate."  

I once noted that Simps was so dense he should be The Wizard of Osmium.  I don't think he got the joke. 

Update 2:  Now he's repeating the idiocy that "Queens is a separate place with its own government" when the last time we went over that I listed, from the official website, the representatives on the city council who represent Queens as they represent all the other boroughs.  Not only did they not teach that idiot member in good standing at The Brain Trust (see above for explanation) basic math or science, they never taught him anything about civics.  Not to mention that "Queens" as all such political subdivisions are entirely artificial human constructs which are whatever they're defined as being at any given time.   

These secular-sciency-play-lefties are only marginally smarter than the Trumpsters on a few things.  Some of them important, many of them counter-productive.  They are idiots the real left must dump after watching them lose us elections since 1964. 

Update 3:  You remember I said that I'd only quote the Simp if it wasfor a good reason?  Or implied that?  Well, he just said,  "Queens is a seperate place onto itself. With its own government, defined geographical borders and its own culture, which is different from that of the rest of New York City,"  not realizing that a. he admits in it that Queens is a part of New York City, which would mean that New York City would have to be as diverse if not more diverse than Queens, b. that even if that were true that it has a political status different from the other boroughs it would still make it a part of New York City (I doubt it's true but I don't care enough to fact-check, it doesn't matter for my point.)  and c. to claim that Queens has "its own culture" as a means of proclaiming its diversity would seem to be rather at cross purposes and, d. that if Queens had "it's own culture which is different from the rest of New York City," which is doubtful, it would prove that the larger set,  New York City, which contained both the "culture" of Queens and any different "culture" in even one of the other boroughs is more diverse than Queens, alone. 

Mentally retarded by choice.  Typical of the play-lefties. 

Update 4:  Maybe he'll get it if I do it by picture.  I figure he's still stuck at the Colorforms stage of development, something he shares with Trump. 
Sorry, couldn't find one that has his name on it, to help him focus.