Just for you Nancy...

...black becomes white, dark becomes light.

I'll probably fiddle with this blog later. There was already some broken code on it, etc.

Worth quoting...

I was just reading some blogs and came across this:

In the real world, not the paranoid fantasies of anti-Patriot-Act mouth-frothers, there is not a shred of evidence that America is using torture anywhere. Not even in Guantanamo.

And if we learn anything from the aberrant events at Abu Gharib, it's this: If wacko mistreatment of prisoners is going on, it can't be kept secret.

American soldiers are not perfect. In the heat of battle, terrible things are done. There really is such a thing as blood-lust, the berserker mentality in which adrenalin-charged people carry out appalling acts of slaughter, and Americans are not immune to it.

There are also sick or evil people who use war as an excuse to indulge their immoral desires.

These things happen in all armies, throughout all of history. And in many cultures, such acts are institutionalized. Many American Indian tribes routinely tortured prisoners; the Spanish Inquisition really happened.

What is remarkable about American soldiers is that, on average, there has never been a more humane group of soldiers in the history of the world. Sure, Yanks have been resented as occupiers or conquerors -- what occupiers or conquerors have not been?
[...]
American soldiers have died or risked death to save civilian lives. They have also served the civilian population in many other highly visible ways. Many Iraqis -- perhaps most -- trust an American soldier more than any other figure in their country right now.

Yet somehow most charges of widespread torture by Americans in Iraq come from insane anti-American Americans, like Ramsey Clark and his ilk. Most Iraqis know they have been liberated from a terror state, not had a new one imposed on them.

With our highly targetable weaponry, America has virtually renounced damage to civilians as a method of war. In our ground engagements, our soldiers are able to be far more selective in targeting than any army in history.

No army has ever been as self-restrained as our army is today. And that is not because of pressure from the Left. It's because our soldiers are decent American citizens who are serving their country, not getting vengeance or indulging authority fantasies.

So these charges of torture, so carelessly and negligently made by our leading television writers*, are being applied to Americans who are innocent of such offenses.

Yet foreigners are being convinced that Americans are all torturers, because our own TV shows admit it; and it is hardly far-fetched to say that this creates part of the climate from which our terrorist enemies recruit their bombers. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that there will be an undeniable causal chain from these charges of torture to dead American, military and otherwise.

(Orson Card from Ornery.org)

*The only television show I watch is Lost because the writing is decent, although some may argue for other reasons, and sure enough the Americans as torturers notion was written into it. It seems to be an element of the pop-culture now. Usually all it takes to shatter the pop-cultural imagery of the moment is a minimal amount of historical and philosophical knowledge. E.g., the American Empire is the most benevolent to have ever achieved hegemony and even if it purposefully tortured and killed thousands of people it would generally still have to be ranked at the top given how low the standards for running the human race have been set by other cultures. For what is the standard, is it relative to other cultures and Empires or not? In the case of America, it seems to me that there has never been another nation founded on metaphysical notions of transcendence to the same extent. Instead, most nations have always been about the physical tribe, culture and so on instead of the metaphysical ideas like those at the roots of America that are applicable to all its citizens because all its citizens are supposed to believe that an essential Natural Law transcends cultures, race/skin pigmentation, ethnicity/communication habits, etc., like light defining and sustaining all the colors of a rainbow.

I tire of the Leftist tendency of rebelling against all notions of transcendence, yet living as intellectual parasites on the very same notions anyway. I believe in shaking them off of what they live on, thus opening the possiblity that they will evolve and learn to support the metaphoric Tree of Liberty rather than eat away at its roots.

Note that in America the most neurotic Leftists who take the pattern to the point that it is the material of satire are so phobic and neurotically anxious to defeat the "Christian Taliban" (Who establish their theocracy by putting "In God we trust." on the money and this sort of thing combined with assorted horrors like public displays of the Ten Commandments.) that they'll turn a blind eye to the real Taliban succeeding. Yet they will come to find what "theocracy" and the Taliban really is if they succeed in their goal of treating cultures which are not equal, as if they are equal. Once a physical host dies there is no longer anything protecting a parasite from cold external realities and the same seems to apply in the metaphysical world of ideas. It's the same with these intellectually incompetent artists and writers who cannot find the courage to engage in negative imagery with respect to other cultures, leaving only their own to create such imagery of. You can be sure that someone is going to have negative imagery created about them, as there is not much of a way to tell a good story otherwise, so when it is politically incorrect to be creative in that way with respect to pretty much all other cultures it finds an outlet against our own. We're probably the only culture that does this, as artists in other cultures seem to have no problem creating negative imagery about America.

E.g.

This film portrays the Kurds of northern Iraq as puppets of the Americans and as a motley crew of dirty, cowardly soldiers with the exception of one soldier who (what else?) sides with the Turks. The Americans' atrocities include attacking a wedding and killing the groom as well as a child -- in front of its mother of course -- before relishing in the torture of any survivors. The doctor who peddles organs is a Jew who selects his victims as if in a concentration camp before readying their organs for export to the US and Israel. Another traditionally dressed Jew with ringlets of hair (in northern Iraq!) leaves the area at the first sign of danger.

(Spiegel)

The irony of negative imagery is that it is usually a projection of one's own conscience creating the imagery of its own condemnation. That's why you have to be careful about such things when it comes to creating metaphors and verbal pictures. Or in this case film, as note that it is Turkey as a culture and nation that engages in torture often enough that evidence of it threatens its path to the EU and so on. It seems that the film may be a fitting national projection. It would be interesting to see what American artists projected onto their screens if they ever felt comfortable with creating and projecting negative imagery outward. Yet for now most of their creativity is masked behind cultural and moral relativism, a sort of inward and subjective babeling if you will. If the artist engaging in that is pressed, then their latent creativity/imagination will come forth.

[Still reading? If so, I'm surprised you lasted this long. Reading and thinking can be hard, just watch your own imagery and metaphors as they will usually reveal that your mind is condemning you again. But that's not always the case.]

That's better.

I haven't been blogging much lately. I'll get back to it. I should watch an action movie on my new screen but instead I put on Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price. It's not the best Leftist kook type documentary ever.
In the beginning it shows the proverbial mom and pop stores vamping up to compete with Walmart. So it would seem that mom and pop could stand a little update? Then it shows some abandoned stores that seem like they had always been old and run down. It reminds me of the local hardware store being against the Home Depot coming in, yet because they don't carry much sometimes I have to drive to the Home Depot anyway. Would the Home Depot put them out of business, probably, but the employees would probably be paid more anyway.

On this local note, the way Newark is there will probably always be a bunch of old blowhards ready to ramble about the "fabric of Newark" for however long it take to make them feel important, then vote to protect some tattered remains of the so-called "fabric." What is the fabric of Newark, exactly? After all, even the University of Delaware apparently is not a part of it given the statements of some city leaders. They actually seem to view themselves as protecting the city from the University, failing to see that much of the city is the University. Much of it seems to boil down to this pattern of viewpoint: "Progress? We don't need no progress or Home Depot. Why, when I was a boy we had to gnaw wood to pieces with our teeth! That's how Newark was built, by my fabrication of its fabric, I says. So by my fabrications of the way things were that's the way they will stay until the day I die!"

Ironically, old conservatives will come into agreement with so-called progressives on progress because they both tend towards the same attitude about technology although they get there through different paths. It's odd that the Left and so-called progressives are usually against the tycoons, Big Business and so on because it is a matter of history that the tycoons are likely to bring "progress" and change even if they are often corrupt.

Who is it that is supposedly merely reactionary and driven by fears of progress, technology, science and change again? The Right? As for me I don't believe in fitting in with either the Left or the Right, yet the so-called Center has been filled with all the people that are merely too stupid and ignorant to make up their minds instead of being the place of the ideal Aristotlean zenith/mean between two vices. I.e., the centrist these days often seems to believe that merely avoiding being associated with the Right or the Left means that they must be of the ideal Center when actually it may just mean that you sit in the center of your own lack of judgment.

I suppose I'll just think what I think about things and let others try to classify my pattern of thought if they like. The Right and the Left are useful definitions and ways of classifying thought, that's probably why they evolved the way they did, yet they're also often relative.

Nietzsche...

It would seem that someone did not get that far beyond good and evil. E.g.

The author of the account of [Nietzsche's] collapse speaks beautifully of Nietzsche’s mind, forever extinguished in 1889: it was born out of music and that it expired in music. The strange desire, so frequent in Germany: to pass away in beauty, was fulfilled for him. .... As the correspondence of his last period reveals, he imagined himself to be either the God Dionysos or the Crucified. In this latter role he caused a public—and in reality humanely beautiful—scandal, which led to his transfer to the asylum for nervous diseases in Turin:
Nietzsche interfered in Turin with a cab driver who was mistreating his horse, as so often happens in Italy. Nietzsche embraced the horse’s neck and prayed that it be beatified in the name of God. Then he collapsed.

(Nietzsche and After
by Robert Rie
Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 13, No. 3. (Jun., 1952) :366)

It is a fitting end to the life of the mind. For all his comical preaching about the Superman in the world of ideas it seems that Nietzsche was always too tender hearted to go beyond good and evil himself, as that is evil.

I've debated whether Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi before. There is a case to be made that he was (many of his ideas were picked up by the Nazis) and a case to be made that he wasn't (he was like an anti-anti-Semite). In the past I would make the case for his proto-Nazi side, yet I can also agree with this:

The tension between Nietzsche’s ideals and his complete impotence explains the collapse. His sentences and catchwords, his formulations, but never his intentions, caused German Nazi misdeeds.

(Ib. :369)

It still seems to me that if your words and formulations are not linked to reality and your intentions, then you are merely a liar. Yet there is in the words, language and ultimately the Word at least a little space for learning a knowledge of good and evil, and then perhaps even going beyond good and evil by grace.

Darwinian reasoning....

I have found the thing about explaining Darwinism to someone who has not been indoctrinated and imprinted with its fraudulent type of "imagery" as a child is that it seems fundamentally unreasonable to them, naturally. It seems that again and again a Darwinist will have to rely on their own imagination, so if your imagination does not match then the arguments that they've based on their own imagination will not make any sense.

Darwin's skill was transmuting his own blurred imagination to supposed "facts" about form, e.g.:

He who will go thus far, if he find on finishing this treatise that large bodies of facts, otherwise inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of descent, ought not to hesitate to go further, and to admit that a structure even as perfect as the eye of an eagle might be formed by natural selection, although in this case he does not know any of the transitional grades.

The Origin of Species (I.e., the origin of form in life forms.)

After a Darwinist is through going through all of Nature sifting it for similarities to imagine historical claims about while rejecting differences that falisfy their imaginings, then they claim that the rest ought to be imagined! As if they had not done enough imagining about history already? Darwin may be lost in his own imagination about history yet the result is that he simply lies about what he is doing when it comes to hypothetical imagination vs. theoretical reasoning, as ironically he continues in the next sentence:

His reason ought to conquer his imagination; though I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths.

(Ib., emphasis added) Yet if reason had conquered his imagination then he wouldn't be asking others to imagine that natural selection can be extended in nearly infinite ways, nor that it has some sort of "sight" by which it can "pick" different forms to draw out images. It seems to me that Darwin is explaining what is going on in his own head as he picks forms and patterns of imagery that suit his further imaginations that culminate with the claim being we should imagine natural selection with near infinite capacities. This is why I cannot do anything but call the imaginary mind of this man a liar when it claims that "reason must conquer imagination." Not to worry, I didn't attack the man, just the mind that he seems to have lost somewhere in his own imagination.

Given the reliance of such a mind on imagination, even the supposed possiblity of the falsification of its ideas are clearly impossible being that they are based on a possible failure of its own imagining. And why would a mind want to imagine its own failure? E.g.:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

(Ib. emphasis added) He just can't admit that he's the one imagining numerous, successive, slight modifications and instead merges and mixes his own imaginings in with supposed actual cases. I think it is telling that to remain atheistic when it comes to Life and the fundamental origins of its form people have to engage in Darwininan "reasoning" in which you work your own imagination in to count as fact to such a point that even your supposed falsification is clearly a negative argument of impossiblity that has nothing to do with the facts. No one will ever be able to prove a negative that is rooted in your own imagination. And of course it is impossible for you yourself to "imagine" a sequence in which your own theory absolutely breaks down.

But that's only because it was your own hypothetical excrement* to begin with.

*Although "unclean" excrement does have this way of being turned back to forms of life, it is not the origins or cause of form. Maybe there is some metaphoric Excrement that considers being equal with that which is truly the genesis of form something to be grasped. Then I suppose some might ask, "But who excreted the Excrement?" But that's another post.

A new blog...

Here's another ID blog, sort of, they seem a little uncertain of themselves and unaware of how weak their opponents are. I've been amusing myself in the comments section. (Here and here...if I could sharpen my rhetoric and barbs more, I would. It's a goal. I look at it this way, if you have to eat your words then they'll be especially bitter. One may as well make use of language to learn, since that's what one of its main purposes seems to be.)

Maybe I will do a post on the whole embryonic "gill slit" canard that Darwinists believe in sometime. It's hard to make what amounts to Haeckel's old ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny sound reasonable enough to argue against. Perhaps I'll just compare it to some more ancient ideas about embryos that are also amusing.

It is hard to believe that biologists, biology textbook writers and American university professors still believe such things and are still looking for ways to prop up the argument, yet they do.