Public statements vs. private views among gay activists

This is typical, the private thoughts of a gay activist:

We have not come out as transsexuals, leather dykes, masochists, drag queens, or pedophiles - all [dis]orientations shocking to middle class and even radical feminist society and even more totalizing in the creation of a singular identity. One would expect that if openly gay scholarship comes to be accepted in the legal academy....little waves of new outsiders will form. Every assimilation generates new lines being drawn and new outsiders being created.

(Chicago-Kent Law Review 1996
71 Chi. Kent. L. Rev. 977
Symposium on the Trends in Legal Citations and
Scholarsihp: Outsider-Insiders: The Academy of the Closet
by William N. Eskridge, Jr.) (Emphasis added)

Compare with what the activist represents to the public on similar cultural shifts:

ESKRIDGE: But the point is that in Sweden, we've seen some of the same trends that we saw in Denmark. So in Sweden, the rate of marriage had been plummeting in 1994, when they adopted same sex unions. The rate of marriage has been increasing in Sweden since 1994.

O'REILLY: OK. I think what we can draw...

I think what we can draw...

O'REILLY: Same thing we can draw from this - I think we can draw this - this is what I'm drawing from all of your data. The gay marriage per say, the marriage of homosexuals, doesn't really impact on straight marriage for those who want a traditional union.

But it does, Mr. Spedale, it does lead to a more libertine or permissive society in the sense that marriage itself then is de-emphasized as we see in Sweden. And more and more people cohabitate.

SPEDALE: No. I think that's not true. .... In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in each of those countries after they passed their gay marriage type laws, their registered partnership records, the rates of heterosexual marriage went up per capita. The rates of heterosexual divorce went down.
[...]
...the important thing here really is the fact that we found that gay marriage in practice does not effect, and may even actually have the opposite point.

O'REILLY: I will give you that point. I agree with both of you that that's true, that Lenny, Mary, and Squiggy doesn't have had anything to do with anybody marrying a woman, any man or a woman marrying a man.

But I will submit to you that the permissiveness and the de-emphasis on traditional marriage has affected these Scandinavian societies, professor. I don't think there's any doubt about it.

ESKRIDGE: Mr. O'Reilly I give you another "A". But one of the reasons that the divorce rate has gone up in Scandinavia is no fault divorce. ....

(Fox News Network
Show: The O'Reilly Factor
June 5, 2006
TRANSCRIPT: 060501cb.256
NEWS; Domestic
Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendment
Guests: Darren Spedale, William Eskridge)

To his credit Eskridge isn't entirely inconsistent and seems to admit the point but quickly shifts away from the obvious impact that culture and ethos have, yet among cultural insiders* he felt much more comfortable with admitting to the correlation of all sexual disorientations. People have been conditioned to feeel that correlation is something controversial but it is so true as to be trivial and can be verified empirically throughout human history. One can play games with specific statistics dealing with small shifts and so on but generally the "common sense" type people like O'Reilly who focus on the culture and its ethos are correct on the issue, so Eskridge is left with avoiding the truth that he's already admitted to in private while playing games with statistics to argue the opposite now. All the while, he would not have much of a problem with seeing things through the eyes of people even further outside that current "outsiders" but for political reasons that cannot be focused on in public.

*Interesting to note that the "insiders" are the Judiciary and an increasingly morally degenerate legal culture that acts as a subculture beginning to wage a Kulture Kampf against traditional American culture. Many seem to be realizing some of the dangers of what goes on in American legal culture but don't realize that it is most likely merely symptomatic of the decline of American civilization in general and likely just a forerunner of it.

A case for cold toads...

[Edit, I was checking this comment for formatting issues. I suspect that it's of limited interest to most but I'll leave it here for those interested in arcane issues of science. I.e. those who think, "A debate on a study on toads from the last century? Well boy oh boy, just what I was looking for!"]

There was another deranged charlatan, a rabid Lamarckian by the name of Paul Kammerer, who was finally exposed largely through the efforts of William Bateson and the American herpetologist G. Noble. He committed suicide. The entire episode is recounted in Arthur Koestler’s book ”The Case of the Midwife Toad."

Is it? Maybe I have a little prescription that can be prescribed for you, but first a summary of the case:

[Kammerer's] results inspired determined opposition from disciples of the new Mendelian genetics, particularly from its spokesman William Bateson. After years of exhausting controversy, Kammerer allowed the American herpetologist G. K. Noble to examine his last specimen of modified Alytes. The toad had no nuptial ‘pads; moreover, the black coloration on its left hand had been produced (or at least erhanced) by the injection of India ink.
Seven weeks after the publication of Noble’s report Kammerer killed him- self. This seeming admission of guilt created his legend with its obvious moral on the dangers of zealous advocacy.
Koestler, with his usual richness of style and intelligence, has convinced me that this common reading is, indeed, legend in the derogatory sense. He combines an analysis of published sources, the testimony of living witnesses, and even some scientific experimentation of his own to argue (i) that the injection was more likely performed by one of Kammerer’s numerous enemies than by Kammerer himself; (ii) that, in any case, it was done after Kammerer’s famous demonstration of the specimen in England in 1923; (iii) that Kammerer probably succeeded in producing nuptial pads in his water-bred Alytes (though Koestler seems unaware that, as I shall mention later, this provides no confirmation of Lamarckian inheritance); and (iv) that Kammerer’s suicide was due as much to the mundane passions of unrequited love and economic failure as to the burden of tragic deceit. Moreover, Koestler has drawn an inference from the debate that is profoundly disturbing because it is probably of general application: the mistrust that established professionals felt for Kammerer arose more from his unconventional personality—his “artistic” temperament, his verbal ability, his unpopular politics—than from any legitimate doubt about the validity of his methods.

(Review: Zealous Advocates
The Case of the Midwife Toad by Arthur Koestler
Review author: Stephen Jay Gould
Science, New Series, Vol. 176, No. 4035.
(May 12, 1972), :623)

It seems that a typical pattern emerges when anyone (anyone, for any reason) rejects the urge to merge the past into the present or the specific into hypothetical goo that the Darwinian mind lives on. I.e., those who refuse to run with the Herd that such minds form and merge into tend to be trampled by it. But another reviewer of the book you cite notes that in this case the Herd may not have had a profound impact:

...from the book it appears that a more relevant factor [than the scientific debate] was the post—war economic crisis that destroyed both Kammerer’s world and his livelihood rather than scientific controversy in which he clearly could hold his own. Suicide or breakdown could well have seen the end of the highly-strung personality that peers from these pages, quite apart from the scandal. Particularly since it seems obvious now that Kammerer had nothing to do with the faking.

(Reviewed Work: The Case of the Midwife Toad by Arthur Koestler
Review by D. F. Roberts
Man New Series, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Jun., 1972), :323)(Emphasis added)

In contrast to the legends of the madmen, crackpots and kooks that the banal and conventional sometimes believe in from within the establishment, those outside sometimes view things totally differently. In this instance:

Paul Kammerer was an Austrian biologist... Throughout most of his life he was a distinguished experimental researcher with an international reputation. Nature magazine called his last book ‘one of the finest contributions to the theory of evolution which has appeared since Darwin.’ Surprisingly, however, Kammerer’s work did not support the evolutionary views of Darwin, but on the contrary provides some of the most convincing experimental evidence ever produced of an evolutionary mechanism far more important than the Darwinian mechanism: a mechanism that is at present denied entirely — the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Kammerer’s story was brought to a modern audience by Arthur Koestler in his book The Case of the Midwife Toad.

Kammerer worked at the prestigious Institute for Experimental Biology... Over several decades he carried out intricate breeding experiments with many generations of animals and plants to try to find evidence that individuals evolve not because of the selection of chance mutations (the Darwinian idea) but because they were in some unknown way able to adapt their physical features to their habitat or way of life.

Kammerer searched the animal and plant kingdoms, both on land and in water, looking for individuals he could breed in the laboratory that might exhibit this kind of evolution. He found many such examples. He bred spotted salamanders on different colour soils and found that over successive generations they changed colour to resemble that of the soil on which they were bred: those bred on yellow soil showed a progressive enlargement of the yellow spots on their bodies until they became predominantly yellow, while those reared on black soil showed a diminution of the yellow spots until they became predominantly black. When the offspring of these genetically modified salamanders were moved to the opposite colour soil to that of their parents, their coloration changed back again.

It is important to appreciate that this kind of genetic evolutionary change is entirely anti-Darwinian in nature. It is an example of directed genetic change (although the mechanism that directs it is entirely unknown); a heresy that all Darwinists vehemently deny is possible.

(Alternative Science: Challenging the
Myths of the Scientific Establishment
by Richard Milton :224-225)

I suppose that Kammerer is heretical to you as well, even if you don't have much of a Herd to run with given how you've tried to prescribe your capacity for adaptability.

How progressives abandoned religion, helping along the rise of the "religious right"

Inherit the Wind represents some of the background mythology that progressives tend to believe about science and religion to this day. So it's worth pointing out that there is evidence that what drew religious people into the debate was the proto-Nazi nature of the eugenics movement and the politics of social Darwinism, not the desire to "impose" a theocracy from on high or to establish a church and so on.

I.e.,

The trial of John T. Scopes is an important milestone in the history of American legal thought. Known in the vernacular as the "Scopes Monkey Trial," the case took place in Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925. [...] At the time, the trial was the most public confrontation between religious fundamentalism and modern science. By 1955, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee had written a play about the trial called Inherit the Wind, and film treatments of that play followed. These fictionalized accounts helped to create a mythic view of the case in popular culture. Today, the case is usually seen as a fable [Although it seems to be seen by most as historical fact.] that cautions against the dangers of religious establishment.

This interpretation of the case, however, omits key facts. Most importantly, the motivations of the Christian fundamentalists in seeking to ban the teaching of evolution must be questioned beyond the commonplace myth because, prior to the turn of the twentieth century, fundamentalists voiced no opposition to Darwin's evolutionary theory. It was after the First World War and after the legal environment for the poor and labor had been transformed through the rising tide of legal formalism that the fundamentalists began to reject theories of evolution. Without such crucial historical facts, the case appears to convey a simple and clear polemical message: fundamentalism ignores reason, and evolutionary theory is scientific, rational, and progressive. When one considers the complaints that the fundamentalists had against evolutionary theory, the popular account of the case seems at best incomplete.

This Article argues that a more thoroughgoing analysis of the history of the case, and especially the role of William Jennings Bryan, who was a leader of the fundamentalists' anti-evolution efforts, is needed to correct the distorted view of the popular understanding. As some historians have noted, the case took place in a period when the theory of social evolution that is associated with Herbert Spencer deeply influenced social thought. Spencer's philosophy of social evolution would later come to be called Social Darwinism...

(Capital University Law Review (2004)
Inherit the Myth: How William Jennings Bryan's Struggle With Social Darwinism and Legal Formalism Demythologize the Scopes Monkey Trial
by Kevin P. Lee)

The myths that came to surround the trial thanks to H.L. Mencken (unsurprisingly anti-semitic) and the Old Press were part of a general trend of progressives cutting away the religious foundation for their values combined with the rise of the "religious right."

So progressives are left with a littany of "problems" devoid of a unifying vision, i.e. a repetitive chant about "healthcare, the environment, education" and so on that the mind gets lost and weighed down in instead of an uplifting vision that transcends and unifies their specific viewpoints. E.g.

Bryan mixed his religion and politics. His pacifism and support for labor were both part of what he called applied Christianity. By this he meant that he believed that Christianity provided the principles for public policy and an approach to public life. One historian recalls:
"On one occasion Bryan was asked why Democrats were so earnest about democracy. He replied that to every Democrat "who knows what democracy means -- it is a religion, and when you hear a good democratic speech it is so much like a sermon that you can hardly tell the difference between them." This was true, Bryan continued, because a good sermon is built upon the ten commandments, the sermon on the mount, and the eleventh commandment..."

(Ib.)

Now that progressives have been conditioned to feel that the ten commandments are unconstitutional they are left with their littany of problems, which depresses people. It doesn't seem that great for getting people to vote for you, which is probably why Republicans have been able to remain in power without doing much of anything.

(Related links: The Monkey Trial
This post was edited and extended from a comment here.)

Comments...

Here, here and here, you might not understand them if you don't know much on the issue of origins. (Besides the fact that most were written once and done.) You've been warned.

Weird but true...

In fact, I'd say that the violence and misogyeny in rap make it a good music form for (militant) Islam. --Seeker

Examples:

In February 2004, a new rap music video created a stir on both sides of the Atlantic. The video, entitled “Dirty Kuffar” (kuffar being the Arabic term for non-believers), was performed by the British group Sheikh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew.[i] The video begins with (clearly doctored) film footage of U.S. troops in Iraq cheering as they purportedly shoot an injured Iraqi civilian, then proceeds through a whirlwind of equally politically tinged imagery. This imagery includes a sniper’s crosshairs honing in on a U.S. soldier standing guard in a tower, U.S. troops shepherding along an orange-jumpsuited Guantanamo Bay detainee with his head hung low, the phrase “Kill the Crusaders” flashing across the screen as a supply truck is blown up by a land mine, and chilling footage of Chechen mujahideen pumping several bullets into a captured Russian soldier lying prone on the ground. The quick cuts and slick editing are evidence of professional-quality production. The viewer can even watch several human beings morph into animals; bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, morphs into a roaring lion early in the video, and later Israel’s Ariel Sharon turns into a pig with a tiny Star of David on its forehead.

As the pro-Islamist images roll across the screen, a rapper in military fatigues and a ski mask rhythmically weaves back and forth before the camera while clutching a Qur’an in one hand and a pistol in the other. His lyrics, voiced in a reggae/rap hybrid style in the mold of popular artist Sean Paul, amount to a condemnation of the war on terrorism and, beyond that, a condemnation of all things Western:

The Ronald Reagan was a dirty kuffar

The Mr. Tony Blair is a dirty kuffar

The one Mr. Bush is a dirty kuffar …

Throw them in the fire

[Fortunately for Clinton he was clean, clean!]

“Dirty Kuffar” finally grinds to a halt with the lyrics “Peace to Hamas and the Hezbollah/ OBL [Osama bin Laden] crew be like a shining star/ like the way we destroy them two towers, ha ha.” The rappers’ laughter can be heard as footage rolls of United Flight 175 slamming into the World Trade Center’s south tower, followed by further footage of the Twin Towers’ billowing collapse.
[...]
Since the emergence of “Dirty Kuffar,” there has been a definable trend toward jihadi rap music: music that indulges in Islamist paranoia, that is anti-American in tone and substance, and that is intended to win sympathy – and perhaps recruits – for the jihadists’ cause. One rap group that clearly falls into the jihadi camp is Mujahideen Team, consisting of Puerto Rican Muslims from Brooklyn and Boston.
[...]
Like Sheikh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew, Mujahideen Team refers triumphantly to the September 11 attacks: “Thirteen tribes blood suckers of the poor/ Holding their heads up high, standing tall/ Like the Twin Towers I’m gonna watch them fall.”

(Link)

Apparently jihadist rappers haven't heard that jihadists were not responsible for the Twin Towers, something they would know if they listened to the arguments of American kooks: "There was some sort of conspiracy to blow up the Towers so that Bush could become Dictator of America! It's because he doesn't like Americans having civil liberties or somethin'. So you know, if things are left up to Bush we won't have any civil liberties left." Etc. Too bad that isn't much of a satire of some of the most politically active Democrats these days. It gets to the point that even moderate Democrats seem to be so busy blaming Bush based on whatever the latest "blame Bush" script happens to be given them by the Old Press that they have little remaining time, knowledge or moral energy to apply to some people that are fairly blameworthy for things, like the jihadists.

On the topic of music, there is a great diversity to art and music that makes it virtually impossible to isolate a specific spirit or meaning to a mode or genre of music unless there are specified lyrics to define the artist's meaning with. (Whether it is "hip hop" or "rock" or anything else.) However, the mode of music itself can more easily lend itself to one specific spirit or meaning than another and so in most good music there is usually a marriage between the mode of the music and lyrics that is meant to touch the harmonies typical to the soul in some way. I think it is impossible to isolate a pattern or mode of music which is somehow "bad" in itself morally, just as you cannot say that one modulation of your voice is morally superior and another inherently inferior. Of course, you should not yell all the time and your "angry voice" is only moral to use in certain contexts. I'd argue that modes of music are the same way and so on but I've heard various scholars argue that if heavy metal as a mode of music were around in Hitler's day then the Nazis would have used it instead of patriotic marches. They seem to be implying that heavy metal is inherently evil. It's curious that there is evidence that they are correct in some sense given that neo-Nazis use heavy metal as their preferred medium these days. E.g. some of the titles of their songs: Laws of Blood, Divine Arms of Hate, etc. The genre of "extreme heavy metal" and the mode of music itself does generally lend itself to hate and anger, so one could say that when it comes to heavy metal it lends itself to and is modulated by "This is my angry voice!" Yet there's nothing necessarily wrong with an angry voice. There are plenty of things worth hating or being angry about, it is just that in an age where the very word "hate" is a buzzword that is equated with evil by those who are ruled by their feeelings, modes of music that lend themselves to hate will be considered vaguely evil as well. It doesn't help when many artists that use a specific mode of music like that impression of evil and intend to create it. But I meander...

One scholar defined Nazism as the practical and violent resistance to transcendence, so perhaps on the other hand Islamism can be defined as the practical and violent resistance to immanence. Neither manifests much art, let alone good art worth analyzing, as both Nazism and Islamism seem to tend to shut down the creative process necessary for it. In contrast, Americanism has always included the belief that transcendence and immanence can be married and left people free to try to achieve such a marriage for themselves, so it would seem that the American Empire will continue to entertain the world with its art while trying to manage things with its technology until it falls into scientism. At that point art will probably be censored by healthcare professionals working for the State for the sake of our "mental health" and so on, for free though...because we'll have free healthcare for all and all that.

I say that America will fall into scientism because there is evidence that the Weimar Republic is similar to the American. And for all the paranoia among Leftists about the Right and "religion" it is much more likely that Americans will come to believe in the myth of a scientifically organized State that is capable of total/totalitarian management to keep everyone healthy and safe than that there will be an "American Taliban" that comes to power to impose a theocracy from on high. The evidence can already be compiled even now about what pattern people are falling into, it is and will be the doctor or the scientist who has the power to take away your liberty in the American Republic and not some cleric or religious leader.

Mel Gibson

It seems to me that the Old Press is doing more reporting on Gibson's drunken anti-Semitism than it usually does on the anti-Semitism prevalent in the Arab world and Arab media. I can make excuses for them though, the Old Press has to sell a story and Americans are more interested in pop-culture suited to narcissism than they are in international issues. E.g., even if international politics and Arab anti-Semitism impacts the price of oil, the fickle American idle would rather chatter about their image makers, their so-called "stars" and the idols they make for them. It's always possible to shift responsibility. One could do so for Gibson as well, the Old Press has the modern tools of scientism to shift to framing the story with medicalization by focusing on alcoholism as a "disease" and so on. It often does so and it might even frame the story that way if Gibson was more of a believer in scientism himself, etc.

It seems that with all the postmodernist shifting of stories and contexts that goes on it becomes difficult to say much of anything that stands as a judgment made by language. Take the divine example, "And God said let there be this and that, and so there was this and that. And God saw that it was good." Enough said. There's something to be said for saying enough, with nothing too much and nothing found wanting. But we live in a postmodernist age and so must chatter on, the Old Press is perhaps the worst example of framing stories with a lack of moral clarity in text and language because it has to sell its own chatter for money, so the more the better. If the issue is defined with moral clarity and judgments about good and evil are rendered there is not as much left for them to chatter on about. Generally if there is no "controversy" there is no story.

Note the moral reasoning and the issues of good and evil that serve as unspoken contexts in the Old Press for this story, driving drunk may be a little evil given that someone may get killed but racism is the great Evil. It seems that this is so because racism is about the only thing that American image makers will use their power as artists to condemn as evil without a little mincing dance of moral equivalency combined with some murmuring about seeing things from all sides or seeing things in black and white, etc. Artistic postmodernists have a deft hand when it comes to blurring away any sense of moral clarity, yet generally when it comes to racism things become right and wrong and judgment tends to be rendered without any shifting of contexts and so on. The interesting thing is that the Old Press and American image makers cannot seem to tell the story or craft the images that represent the most virulent form of racism in our time that is exemplified in Arab anti-Semitism just as before they couldn't seem to work against scientific racism and proto-Nazi eugenics. If anything they tended to support eugenics, as any reading of the papers of the day will show. It seems ironic that although the great bugaboo for the Old Press these days is racism it is still biased towards racist movements.

I suppose I shouldn't say that the Old Press has a good deal of moral clarity with respect to right and wrong when it comes to racism given that its moral judgment is often applied along racial lines anyway.

Some information on Arab media:
"Obsession: What the War on Terror is Really About"

Link from Anna Venger's post on this story. Note the rampant sober anti-Semitism throughout Arab media that is broadcast on sattelite feeds for anyone to see, yet the Old Press can't seem to bring itself to report much about it. They are probably too busy reporting on Gibson's drunken anti-Semitism. Given the level of reporting in the Old Press one would think that Jews will be killed as the result of Gibson's comments but notions promoted unapologetically in Arab media such as Jews sacrificing boys by slitting their throats and using the blood to make matzos...well, that's probably harmless.

[Edit: I wasn't going to make a comment about matzos using religious metaphors because only the religious understand religious metaphors. But I was reading a local blog and came across this, so I will leave a note for the metaphorically minded after all. For by the way such blood libels about sacrifices keep repeating it seems that the metaphoric Yeast wants to argue that the Jewish father of all Jews had to literally sacrifice his only son instead of recieving the gift of symbols and signs of the metaphoric Lamb of God by faith. If the metaphoric Yeast could talk it seems that it would argue that the killing of boys began with Abraham and continues among the Jews, perhaps something about Abraham's story gets its metaphoric goat. Or perhaps it might snivel, "Does the Bread of Life really rise so high above me? Well, matzos are flat without yeast...so that must mean that yeast is good or somethin'." Etc. It seems that when it comes to good and evil the debate is always the same even if the language used to express things is not religious metaphors that few will have knowledge of these days and instead the debate is expressed with the questionable questions so typical to postmodernism. It seems a bit odd to express meaning or information with bits of bread and so on but Christ reiterated the same metaphors. Again he asked, "What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough."]