Long ago, it became clear that genetics was going to upend all of the Progressive assertions about human nature. In fact, it was going to challenge the core of Western Liberalism. It’s a little hard to hold onto the idea that “All men are created equal” when you no longer believe in God and science says some men are more equal than others. It’s impossible to maintain the universalism that is the foundation stone of the prevailing orthodoxy, when group differences are clearly rooted in genetics and evolution.
This is, of course, the end of the world. All of the laws and political institutions of the West have been modified to comport with the belief that all humans are the same, regardless of location. Race, ethnicity, even sex, are now considered outmoded notions from a less enlightened era. The reason American Progressives endlessly talk about institutional racism, for example, is it is the only acceptable answer for why blacks perform so poorly compared to other groups. To consider anything else runs counter to accepted dogma.
It’s not just Prog dogma that is under pressure from science. Most of what people in the West believe about human nature is rooted in the idea of free will. It is assumed that people can choose to be good or evil. A drunkard, with help and training, can choose not to drink. Everything about the self-help industry is based on free will. If you work at it and buy his materials, you can be just as successful as Tony Robbins. If you take his class, you can be like Mike Cernovich. The assumption is you can make yourself into anything.
Again, the universal belief in free will and the blank slate is the bedrock of the modern West. You see it in this Joe Rogan podcast with Sargon of Arkkad. Both guys are right-libertarians, or at least that is how Rogan would describe himself. Arkkad calls himself a liberal, but he most likely means it in the British sense, which corresponds to our conservatives. In their back and forth, they both start from the premise that people are free to make of themselves what they will, regardless of their biology.
Whether we like it or not, science is punching big holes in this underlying belief. At the individual level, it is becoming increasingly clear that your general intelligence is a result of your genes. Personality traits are clearly biological. Even without genetics, people had understood this to be true up until fairly recent. Then there are group differences, which have always been out in the open, but made taboo. It is only a matter of time before science begins to confirm what people have always known about human diversity.
We are on the cusp of an age, not all that dissimilar to the end of the Renaissance when science and philosophy began to challenge the age old assumptions of the West. The Church gets a bad rap for Galileo, but they were not acting without reason. From the perspective of the people in charge, challenges to the prevailing assumptions about the natural world felt like a leap into the void. Maintaining public order is the first duty of an elite. In that age, it felt as if the ground was shifting under their feet.
The difference, and it is a big difference, is we are not experiencing science for the first time and the public is better informed than 400 years ago. In fact, much of what is coming from genetics and the cognitive sciences confirms what our grandparents took for granted about humanity. The expression “the apple does not fall far from the tree” did not become a hearty chestnut by accident. Long before anyone could conceive of the human genome, humans knew that you inherited your physical and mental traits from your parents.
Another big difference is the modern keepers of morality are far less reasonable and more prone to hysteria than the leaders of the Church in the Renaissance. You see it in stories like this one the other day and in efforts like this one. Race mongering is a sacrament of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Academics are forced to play along with the morality of the one true faith,. Those who refuse are accused of heresy and threatened with internal banishment, which is exactly the point of promulgating the term “scientific racism.”
The point of a movie called “A Dangerous Idea” is to serve as a warning. The term “scientific racism” is a nonsense phrase. It has no meaning in the literal sense, but it carries with it the implication that science is subject to moral scrutiny. It does not matter if the conclusions of your research are accurate, you could still be found guilty of the mortal sin of racism. Accuracy is no defense against the charge of heresy. The PC enforcers may not have an Inquisition, but they have an unlimited supply of Torquemadas.
They also will have a lot of sympathetic minds in the general public. In the current age, racism and antisemitism are at the top of the hierarchy of evil. White people stumble all over themselves to prove they have nothing but love in their heart for all mankind. At least three generations have been programmed to think that the ultimate goal of society is to achieve perfect racial parity, where everyone is equal and in perfect harmony. Demonizing anyone who speaks out against the prevailing moral hierarchy is not going to be difficult.
It is easy to be pessimistic about these things, but history says that reality does eventually carry the day. There’s also the fact that science has greater moral authority with the public than the PC enforcers. Then there is the reality on the ground. The migrant invasion of Europe is teaching the West that it is a good idea to have separate countries for different people. Even so, the people in charge are not going to yield without a fight. We are on the cusp of a long ugly period in the West, as the old beliefs give way to the new.
It will not end well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=9ZkE3xB8o8A
Ok, got it. Now I see some fanatics of egalitarianism. I see eight self-righteous gulag builders who can be stopped before they do it again.
Gulag Builder #1: MARY R. MORGAN is a psychotherapist, author, activist, and philanthropist who is founder and president of the Cornerstone Campaign.
Gulag Builder #2: ANDREW KIMBRELL is an internationally recognized public interest attorney, public speaker, and author.
Gulag Builder #3: STEPHANIE WELCH is a documentarian and executive director of Paragon Media, a nonprofit media organization that is the co-producer of A DANGEROUS IDEA.
Gulag Builder #4: An award-winning film director, interactive producer and transmedia storyteller, JED RIFFE has produced 11 nationally broadcast public television specials, including the series California and the American Dream.
Gulag Builder #5: A documentary filmmaker and editor, MAUREEN GOSLING is best known for her longtime collaboration with independent director, Les Blank (Burden of Dreams, Always for Pleasure).
Gulag Builder #6: SARA MAAMOURI is a documentary filmmaker and editor who has explored a diverse range of topics for over 14 years that has touched on social, educational and political issues. She co-produced and edited A Revolution in Four Seasons, which premiered at Hot Docs 2016 and won an honorable mention at the Margaret Mead Film Festival (2017)
Gulag Builder #7: BERTRAM VERHAAG has been making documentaries on political, environmental and social issues. through his own company, DENKmal-Film for over 30 years.
Gulag Builder #8: ANN SKINNER-JONES is the producer and director of award-winning videos for the educational market including The Great Divide on LGBT rights and You Like Totally Have to Talk About It on young people and AIDS.
http://adangerousideafilm.com/filmmakers/
Fyi, a gulag is a government ministry operated by a dominant faction of leftists to administer prisons and work camps used to incarcerate, exploit, and kill people with whom those leftists’ disagree.
It’s by the way that I had a brief conversation yesterday with a guy, a unionized truck driver, who feared that Walmart stores will be used by FEMA to incarcerate numerous Americans after some type of economic collapse. He cited as evidence the razor wire which he said is placed atop the exterior of the stores along the perimeter.
I explained that maybe the razor wire (or barbed wire) is meant to keep vandals off the roofs and thieves out of stores with sky lights. He immediately dropped the topic, but I’m not certain that my skepticism was entirely effective. He had explained a few moments earlier that one obtains LAW by reversing the first three letters of Walmart, and that the second part, mart, is like martial. So, my unionized acquaintance informed me that “Walmart” is coded language about martial law, which would be imposed by corporations in part by using FEMA to lock up people in Walmart stores which already have the razor wire (or barbed wire) installed.
Learn this word, Torquemada. The Progressive left and right, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQ schema, Feminism, Environmentalism, Socialism, Political Correctness sycophants, Islamist’s, radical atheists, the egalitarian technocrats, el al: All are members of this newly named nonreligious religion of TORQUEMADAISM. The name is more than appropriate and aptly describes the required behavior of this faith. All of the above listed delineations are simply ‘denominations’ of the core ideology of the nonreligious-religion of Torquemadaism.
Now you can name it. And names have always had power.
As the old black man told me, “can’t blame a man for what he cannot change, blame him for what he CAN change””
When you read any of the Norse sagas, they typically start out with the genealogy of the person involved. There was a reason for it. You knew, based on who they were related to, how they were going to turn out. Certain families were reckless, others law abiding to a fault. In a small homogeneous community, you knew those things.
Anyone that has raised dogs knows that temperament is inherited. Same with other traits. You don’t have to look to far to see that the same is true in people.
The gene thing has been known for as long as man has domesticated dogs.
The barking mad lunatics who deny 5,000 plus years of documented and readily observable reality really need to be culled.
Can’t remember who said it, but someone once pointed out that the 19th Century showed the world the horrors of chemistry, the 20th Century showed the world the horrors of physics, and the 21st would show the world the horrors of biology, and it would be the most terrifying of the three.
“…and the Gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it again.”
Go read the whole thing, you know how to find it.
You know, I don’t for a minute believe Jefferson thought that all men are created equal in the sense of talent, intellect, judgment, or wealth. The phrase that follows is to the effect that all men are equal in having been endowed by their Creator with certain, inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In those very specific and limited respects, we are all equal. To argue from that to quotas, equality of outcomes, etc., is silly.
“Then there is the reality on the ground. The migrant invasion of Europe is teaching the West that it is a good idea to have separate countries for different people. Even so, the people in charge are not going to yield without a fight.”
Of course they won’t, its not their neighborhoods and schools that the migrants will be settled in. Until it starts affecting them and their children nothing will change. Either the migrants must become a danger to them or we do.
We are clearly outnumbered beyond comprehension. European repopulation statistics aside, there are 1.26 billion people on the African continent less which is only 14 kilometers away from European shores. And those people all have one direction in mind – North!
If even 1% of that number get into Europe – and they have nothing to lose for trying – it’s game over for all of us. Unfortunately, no one in the EU Parliament has a vested interest in our future, so they don’t care.
Then there’s the idiots waving banners in train stations welcoming in these hoards of invaders who have never been to Africa or the Middle East to see what life is like there. Nor have they encountered what these people are capable of doing once turned loose on a civilized people.
But that lesson is starting to be taught.
The lack of struggle, certainly including war and the threat of war, may be the most ruinous condition a people can experience.
“It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw.”
Karl, can you recommend any German blogs/sites?
I mean except the shopblogger, that guy is fantastisch!
@ guest – You may find this one interesting. It gives you some first hand ideas of what young Germans are facing with Nazi’s and Muslims that the media isn’t talking about.
Young Germans who are proud of Germany and proud of being German are labeled “Nationalists”; the EU’s new-speak for “racist”. Especially if one makes the mistake of displaying the German flag anywhere other than at a football game.
Being called a “Nationalist” here is almost like calling someone a “Nazi”. It is the new label for conservative Germans (and other Europeans) who are proud of their own country and want to protect their culture and maintain respect for their history and heritage.
http://raccoons.blogsport.de/
A bit of a bright spot-
In 1950, the combined populations of both Africa and the Mideast were less than postwar Europe.
The left’s agenda is to promote the idea that all deviant behavior is due to genetics in order to eliminate any personal responsibility or accountability for ones actions.
This is why they want our children to embrace every type of diversity, question their gender and accept the reason they are LGB-whatever is because they are genetically predisposed. They want to eliminate the concept of good and bad and turn it into “Well, I was born this way so I have no choice but to act the way I do.”
From the Christian point of view, those things we consider sins have nothing to do with pre-determined anything. They are conscious decisions to do willfully do what is wrong when we know it’s wrong. Don’t commit adultery – I’m just a sex addict. Don’t murder – I’m just a bad-a$$. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain – I have Tourette’s syndrome so swearing in public is just who I am.
I wonder if I could get out of a traffic ticket because I’m genetically programmed to drive fast, so going 100kph through a school zone isn’t really my fault – “I’m just born that way.”
Of course sort of logic takes a person from the elevated position of a human being, the only being on the planet capable of self-reflection, and reduces us to just animals. But that seems to be the direction we’re heading.
Z, what’s your opinion on deplorable Karls healthcare proposals?
Do you agree with the premise and conclusions, would it work as such?
Denninger is under the impression that anything happening in Washington has an eye on making insurance and care better for people. Health care in America is a massive skim. The skimmers are never going to sign off on reform. We’ll just have to wait for collapse.
It’s unfortunate Americans have less access to health care than many developing countries. I was shocked, during my recent trip to the US, how many people I spoke with said their biggest concerns for their futures (or even their present) were (1) retirement and (2) access to health care. And this wasn’t homeless people living under bridges. These were waiters, hotel employees, mechanics, farmers, small business owners – all just regular American’s trying to get by. Unless you can get the massive profit taking schemes out of health care, I don’t see how you can reform US health care in the future.
Actually, we have all the health care we need. There’s been a deliberate and steady campaign to frighten the public in order to keep the skim going. If I need to see a doctor, I can make a call and have an appointment tomorrow. There’s a reason people come from all over the world to the US for treatment. Our problem is good old fashioned corruption. As I’m fond of putting it, we don’t have a shortage of health care, we have a surplus of bandits.
I don’t have insurance and absolutely refuse to submit to Obamacare. Thus, I have to find physicians, occasionally, who will fill a couple prescriptions. When desperate, I order drugs online. What’s happened in the past few years is the increase in the number of doctors who are too afraid to take “self-pay” patients. Perhaps this is due to licensing, but more likely, it’s due to the incredible pressures on doctors to submit to the herd.
The Trump phenomenon and the reaction to him has taught me how many skims are in place these days. Once one applies “what is the skim?” to each manifestation of opposition to Trump, one becomes more aware of how pervasive is the skim, and how many people are in on it in various ways.
And then there are the crybaby “neverTrumps”, who are willing and unwitting tools of the skimmers.
“The reason American Progressives endlessly talk about institutional racism, for example, is it is the only acceptable answer for why blacks perform so poorly compared to other groups. To consider anything else runs counter to accepted dogma.” I say it’s Progressive-controlled mis-education of the blacks. Plus fractured families, as required for welfare money.
When the reality of differing mental capabilities exerts itself, and the lie of “all men are created equal” is put to rest, we will have a new problem. Those who are identified as “superior” will see fit to try to make the decisions for the rest of us.
Though at this point the calculus of the Liberal “woke” thing is being used as a measure, so pretty much any other methodology would be less odious.
All i know is i don’t want to play with the delta children.
re: delta children
What are Delta Children? I know of a company the makes furniture for babies and children called Delta Children. Are you referring to something else?
Dan Kurt
Dan Kurt- Genetically engineered servitor class, social inferiors from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”
(A science fiction novel)
@Alzaebo
Thanks. I read Brave New World in high school in the late 1950s when I went on a Huxley reading binge. I only recall some of the names of the books such as Chrome Yellow, Eyeless in Gaza, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, The Genius and the Goddess, and some others. Looking back most of it Went Over My Head. About all that I can remember from Brave New World is Soma and Artificial Wombs.
I do remember the sadness I had when I read that his house burned down and he lost (most of) his library. He died a few years later on the day Kennedy was shot and C.S. Lewis also passed.
Dan Kurt
Oddly, the insistence that all races are equal in all respects is pretty much a Euro-white phenomenon. Northeast Asians entertain no such illusions. Nor do Ashkenazi Jews, though they’re careful to keep their well-founded opinions to themselves, though they privately celebrate their intellectual superiority. Black Africans clearly enjoy an overall physical superiority over Euro-whites, as evidenced by their virtual dominance in most professional sports. This should be hardly surprising, considering that they evolved on a continent where the rule was “eat or be eaten.” While we’re all members of the human race, we’re not identical or readily interchangeable, despite the best efforts of the statists among who seem determined to hammer square pegs into round holes, whatever the consequences.
Okay, I’ll concede that negroes dominate hoops and certain Olympic events such as the 100, 200, and 400 meter dashes.
Football? Yes, approximately 65% of the NFL is black, but look at the QBs (the pre-snap read in a millisecond by Peyton Manning and Tom Brady is an athletic skill), the offensive linemen, including the tight ends, and the kickers. Besides, if more white kids made it their mission to be great football players, and coaches did not dissuade white boys, you might find the percentages like they were in the 1970s – early 1980s.
Baseball. Dominated by whites vis-à-vis American negroes.
Hockey. Dominated by whites.
Golf. Dominated by whites.
Tennis. Dominated by whites.
Auto racing. Dominated by whites.
Athleticism is not cabined by sprinting speed, vertical leaping, and spear chucking.
Keep in mind that most American black professional athletes are products of selective breeding. If you looked at the average 20 year old male physique of a typical black African today, and compare it to that of a typical white American or European 20 year old male, you might not see much difference.
Africans excel at certain events. None of those events entail swimming or mental gymnastics. The white man juju, intelligence and readiness for inflicting death and destruction on all other races remains undiminished. Our wrath knows no limits.
Blacks dominate in just two, football and basketball. Whites dominate in all the others.
Concentrate white interest into just those two sports, and black participation would crater.
It is easy to succeed in a diluted talent pool.
I’ve never quite seen the absolute distinction between “free will” and determinism, as if the only options were either the complete freedom to do anything whatsoever on the one hand and everything being decided before you were born on the other.
I’ve always thought of life as being like rainwater going down a hillside. You can’t make it go up, but you could decide whether it takes the right hand course around a rock or the one on the left.
To be more concrete, I simply do not have the talent to be a concert pianist (or any pianist for that matter), but with the mental talents I do have, it’s up to me whether I make good use of them or sit around watching crap on the television all day.
They say that alcoholism is to some extent genetic. No idea whether that’s true or not. My parents both drank a lot. I used to drink the stuff, but a while ago I decided I don’t actually like it and haven’t drunk it sense. Make of that what you will.
You get dealt certain cards, and you play them as you will. Some people play them well. Some don’t. To modify the Gandalf quote, “All we have to decide is what to do with the options that are given us.'”
It does not matter if the conclusions of your research are accurate, you could still be found guilty…
Yup. Pilate was the first to articulate that: “What is truth?”.
I’d say that one key rhetorical wedge against Hi Church Progressivism is Z Man’s key insight that without God there is no creation in ‘All men are _created_ equal…’
Q: What’s the atheistic Prog alternative to _creation_? A: _Evolution_!
Make them own “All men are _evolved_ equal…’ So, are there any inalienable rights any more_? Where do they come from_? Why should you have any_?”, etc.
Turns out God is central to the Prog Project. Who knew_?
I think the phrase properly understood would be “All men are created equal before God”.
Went to the links, two observations, one that Gloria S suggests the movie be required, if it isn’t, plenty of other similar garbage already is in high school, two, the term “non-traditional scholarship” I think just means lies that make one of the victim groups feel good and tweaks the noses of the people who actually do all the productive work.
Got some free amusement from Tucker Carlson last night. The latest victim on the spit was some poor woman psychologist who insisted that having “genderless” babies was a fine thing. And that those children could “decide” once they were older which, of the multitude of genders they preferred. Tucker just listened and then asked, “so it would be ok if I decided tomorrow to identify as an Asian female? Because I truly feel that I am an Asian female?” Deer. In. Headlights.
We may have been here before. The Renaissance is synonymous with humanism which carried through into the Age of Reason to form the moral basis of blank slate theory. When people made attempts during this time to apply their scientific ideas to social and economic policy (I’m thinking physiocrats here) results were mixed at best and were rejected. Romanticism was the reaction to what was felt to be an over reliance on science. Frankenstein was a warning as to what could happen when science was applied without moral guidance.
So science never acts in a vacuum and what we are seeing is probably not a linear progression but a pendulum swinging in the other direction once more. The culture in which the science is developed acts as the damper on how it is applied, keeping the pendulum from swinging as far as it would otherwise. In the past the church was the damper, followed by humanists and romanticists all influenced by various philosophers and schools. Since leftism is the dominant cult in the commanding heights of society, the leftists are setting themselves up as the next available moral buffer against the over application of science to various aspects of life.
In other words, the left is smart. They are the real political animals of our age and they live eat and breathe politics at a level that people like us can only imagine. When you have scientists fearing for their academic existence in the presence of blue haired SJWs you have an inauisitorial machine much stronger than any Torquemada ever dreamed of. Galileo and Roger Bacon may have suffered for their science, but they were at least free to do it. The guys now can get shut down at the grant proposal stage and have their entire future cut off from them. The kind of fear that generates is more existential than anything experienced in the past.
I’m not so sure the new religion will hold up well when challenged. It has evolved in a vacuum. Christianity, for all its faults, was an excellent moral authority that gave legitimacy to the ruling classes. This new thing is like Nazism, in that it flourishes only because of a lack of an alternative. Jacobinism had the same problem. It is good at throwing over the old order, but useless at building a new one.
Good point. WH Auden said the same a long time ago. Something like, they want to turn society into a great experiment, but they can never seem to get past the destructive phase.
The destruction applies even to the sciences themselves. I’ve said before that I have no faith in medical research. Here’s the testimony of others:
”
[Marcia Angell, MD in 2009:] “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine” (1).
More recently [2015], Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote that “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness” (2).
”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4572812/
The problem with your profession is that it wanted a monopoly on what constituted good medicine and how it was to be applied and who was going to apply it.
One of the disastrous, though predictable, results of the AMA’s drive to monopolize and control is the outrageous numbers of iatrogenic death.
Typical libertarian, skirting the real issue. Why can’t you just say that we shouldn’t have occupational licensing? Are you afraid? You guys will talk about it with hairdressers and florists and people who sell caskets, but medicine is like some kind of third rail.
Say it, dammit, say it! Abolish medical licensing!
Doc, do you suffer from reading comprehension difficulties?
How am I skirting the real issue?
Maybe this will help:
ABOLISH ALL OCCUPATIONAL LICENSING, BUT MAKE MEDICINE FIRST ON THE LIST!
Remember, it was not the libertarian who agitated for occupational licensing schemes.
Since the public will never go along with such a scheme, what’s your fallback plan?
Why, root out the scourge of libertarianism!
We can accomplish nothing- nothing!- until this evil philosophy of minding your own fricking business is eliminated for all time!
Then we might attend to these other, minor, problems…
Oops! Actually, Zman, that is a very good question. Very, very good.
Well, how about the following?
In taking care of one’s health, employ libertarian principles, such as:
(1) Seek out practitioners who do not accept Medicare;
(2) Seek out health care providers who do not accept Medicaid:
(3) Seek out healers who do not accept any insurance or other third party payments;
(4) Insist upon doing business with only those providers who take cash; and
(5) Patronize providers who are not afraid of the AMA or the FDA or the NIH or any state licensing board.
As for whether the public will ever go along with the abolition of licensing, I would argue that the marketplace has already proven otherwise given the numbers of people, mostly white, of course, who practice the above points and who shun allopathic snake oil.
concept of free will has proven to be a useful one. i’d hate to see it replaced by genetic determinism . all kinds if nuttery shall flourish then
With certain exceptions we all have free will, but not all wills are created equal, and bad will is freer than good.
Life is trade offs. Countless lives could have been spared by treating things like sex crimes as incurable mental disorders. Instead we insist on talking them out of it until it becomes too monstrous to ignore. Putting an end to that madness is a net positive. Similarly, the treatment of disease will vastly improve. On the other hand, the quest for designer babies and eugenics is inevitable.
concept of free will coexisted with the full awareness of human biodiversity . it is in modern times that we see trouble when hbd is being suppressed and free will became a religion instead of useful tool . it could work in the context of genetic tinkering as well. anything that helps man acquiring a conscience is a good thing in my opinion.
Unless it was genetically determined that some will seek to prosecute sex crimes.
I believe in the concept of free will, but biology and genetics will always play a part in how far you can go. I hate those idiots that twist the concept to make somebody believe they can do anything they want because they have free will.
Some people just need to take an old Dirty Harry line from “Magnum Force” to heart, “A good man’s got to know his limitations.” I had the free will when I was younger to set my path to be an NFL football star, but my body size and speed told me that it was not going to happen.
i am talking about free will in the adult context (i hope) . when confronted with a concrete wall you either go around, over it , under it or call an airstrike ; anything except banging your naked head against it.
Agree with both James Wilson and you in the abstract. But I don’t think you’d find any serious scientist today who’d take either side of the false dichotomy between complete genetic determinism and complete genetic indeterminism, i.e., the blank slate doctrine. The proper ‘scientific’ discussion ought to be about the _degree_ of genetic determination, as in from ‘little-to-none known’ to ‘demonstrated-to-be-highly-significant’. And, absent Prog morality police surveillance, it often is that way, so far as I know.
But the Prog morality police are working day and night to stamp out heresy by scientists. Their suppression must therefore multiply as contrary evidence piles up. When will the scientists rebel against their ever growing oppression_?
FWIW, this philosophical tension has existed in serious religious circles since well before Christ (see the Book of Job, for example). It has never been resolved by human reason alone for well over 3000 years. So it is simply prudent to expect that it never _will_ be so resolved.* That is, although I consider it prudent as a matter of faith, one need not be religious to come to the same conclusion.
So, it is yet another marker of arrogant Prog vacuity that they demand that all must take the extreme indeterminist position despite ample evidence to the contrary from many sources (i.e. any relevant area of science, common sense, personal observation and history).
*All serious religions must wrestle with this and related human dilemmas. The pagan Greeks and Roman resolution was that the god’s were arbitrary and capricious. To the extent that I understand it, the (Protestant, at least) Christian response is the God’s wisdom and justice are unsearchably infinite, beyond all human knowledge and understanding. See the last chapters of Job for the earliest known expression.
i thought the church solved that dilemma. you choose to believe the doctrine (including free will) and arrange you life to the best of your abilities as if it were real thing.
it looks to me that is how the progressives operate. and you try to suppress anything that is deviant like millenarian / messiah cults . perfect in group out group dynamics.
The simple question is: when was the last time two Bulldogs had a Poodle puppy?
A side note, really, about inherited tendencies, but- that, properly, is (((Torqemada))- the head who made Inquisition synonymous with brutal political repression.
Oppose, and one was judged a hetetic. (The Prots burned ten times more people, by the way.)
Like William (((Ayers))), or Joe (((Stalin))), what turned me was the lists.
Every. Single. Time.
Torquemada, heretics
Hell, I forgot a famous one: Salmeen Qurayza, aka the (((Mohammed))).
Not accepted as a prophet by those in the Old City, the Medina, to their detriment.
But then- why would a Bedouin ask Jewish elders to declare him a Jewish prophet…?
If you have evidence Ayers echoes I’d be interested in it. I’ve spent the last 10 years becoming a minor expert on the Weather Underground. Unlike nearly every other WU “Inner Party” member, I can only conclude that Bill Ayers’ involvement was due to his family’s connections to Chicago communists, and a healthy case of sociopathy, vs. tribal affiliations.
One of my favorite Ayers stories involves Larry Grathwohl, the only FBI asset to penetrate the leadership. As a Vietnam vet with explosives experience he was viewed as quite valuable to the WU (esp. after the NYC townhouse bomb factory explosion). Ayers instructed Grathwohl to bomb a police substation in Detroit. Next door was the Black owned/operated Red Barn Restaurant. Ayers told Grathwohl to place the bomb between the two buildings to maximize damage. Grathwohl warned him that this would kill untold numbers of innocent Blacks. Ayers cooly replied, “In a revolution people will die.”
Ayers is sporadically active on Twitter. BLM is his pet cause.
I was reading Days of Rage recently. It’s interesting how Ayers was a minor member in the WU at first. He really comes across as ineffective
“Science!” is killing them on several fronts. Abortion? Check, yep, that’s a baby, and we have 3D pictures to prove it. And hey, look, it’s smiling and sucking its thumb. Climate Change? Check, yep, been going on for 4.25B years. And hey, look, you can visit 90% of the states in the Union and find evidence of natural climate change all around you dating back millions of years. (Not to mention those bastards on Discovery Channel and their insistence on explaining HISTORICAL EVIDENCE of massive climate change long before coal plants and SUVs showed up.)
The whole transgender thing is another one that is going to reach its apex at some point in the very near future. In one of the sillier ironies of the culture wars, we are being told that gender is a meaningless socioeconomic construct … not by people who are eschewing gender, but by people who are choosing to be the OTHER gender. So, there really IS something called gender…they’re just mad about the y chromosome or lack thereof.
Oh, and we’re currently witnessing another demolition of “Science!” – that enforcing the laws actually DOES lead to less crime. I think I read today that the CBP is calling the drop in illegals being arrested on the border “miraculous”. Even if that’s a little bit of hyperbole, it’s probably mostly true, and even if it is a little bit true it completely destroys the Government Party’s insistence that illegal immigration is an intractable problem because: Science!
And the list goes on… It’s not a great time to be alive if you’re a Prog true believer. Yeah, you can plug your ears like Axel Foley and cry “I am not listening to Larry, LA, LA, LA!” but you can’t keep that up forever.
One thing that has alway been puzzling to me on the transgender front and hopefully an MD will weigh in. Am old enough to remember the vicious debates about the long term effects of what are relatively low doses of hormones in birth control pills. Cancers of every stripe, heart and circulatory disease…. Yet, seemingly at the drop of a hat we are willing to almost bathe adolescents in these same drugs (surgerical reassignment aside) to suppress the sex characteristics of their genetic sex and encourage development as the other. Having a hard time not envisioning a plague of cancer ridden, whacked out transgenders somewhere in the future. Now in the UK medical professionals are actively debating uterine transplants so transgenders can become “fulfilled” by having babies. Never mind that Gramps is told he needs to sit and die in a wheelchair since the NHS doesn’t have money for artificial hips for older people…
Science will catch up with all of them. Gravity always wins. It’s inevitable. Some future society will look back on the lunatics of today the way we look back on blood letting and alchemy as basically witchcraft.
On an unrelated but related note, this is the same problem the pot-legalizers have. In their rush to legalize the drug, nobody has really thought through the long-term health care implications. People get stuck in meaningless arguments like, “Well, it’s safer than a cigarette,” or, “It’s no different than drinking a couple of beers,” which is the rhetorical equivalent of saying that shooting yourself in the head is “better than” hanging yourself, and then listing the reasons why.
Gravity always wins.
Do you think that there is no evidence which supports the proposition that pot is or can be salutary?
Funny you mention that regarding pot. One of my cousins completed his PhD in animal genetics (he builds animals for a living now) out at Cal in the 80s. Lot of the guys over on the “plant side” of the school back then were spending their spare time on improving pot strains. The payoff from that work is dope that is vastly more potent that what we grew up with in the 70s. And yes, not sure any longitudinal study of long term, frequent consumption takes that into account.
We also have a lot of estrogen in the water supply. Curious how the Left fights against water pollution, but ignores the pollution from female contraceptives.
“So, there really IS something called gender”
yes, it is a term of art in grammar.
People believed in “blue blood” for a long time. Children look like their parents, athletes give birth to athletes, etc. Genetics can confirm this but that was at least known since genes were discovered and likely known as long as breeding plants and animals was done by humans.
I don’t think “all men are created equal” was as literal as you’re portraying it. The founders were not morons who thought everyone was equal in every way. I think the statement was merely a pithy rebuke of monarchy and a statement about how people should be treated under the law.
People can look around the world and see the evidence (Africa is hard to ignore), it’s just that they refuse to believe evidence. I think we’ll have to see a major European country fall before the West gets rid of the disease, and even then it won’t be based off evidence but fear.
Mark_Taylor – I think your take is basically correct. Lincoln’s writings and speeches on the subject also agree. The meaning is about equal protection under the law. And I think the founders were also saying that no one is born a king or a pauper.
I also think Zman is right; accurate science will clearly show that our differences are natural and explainable by historical genetic forces. Perhaps some of us are born kings or paupers.
With racial discrimination lifted and knowledge available to anyone free of charge or institutional bias, we will see the real results on a level playing field.
I wonder if this will be worse than what preceded it.
Jefferson used the words as rhetoric in the Declaration, which is NOT a binding legal document, to negate the “divine right of Kings.” Lincoln, on the other hand, took that rhetoric and made it a lynchpin of the American founding in his Gettysburg Address. He turned Jefferson’s anti-royal rhetoric into an anti-slavery diktat and sole justification for America’s existence. Either way, that phrase needs to be expunged from our history.
Well spake!
Well, they did list the things in which we were to be judged as equal in terms of our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Notably missing from the list of things for which All Men Are Created Equal: smarts, good looks, and a full head of hair.
The preamble leaves out the word in which leads to confusion. Doesn’t this passage make perfect sense?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, *in* that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.