One cannot insure against an event the probability of which is 1. It violates the very concept of insurance.
I have a homeowner's policy for which I pay about $400 a year. It insures against various adverse events such as fire. Suppose I didn't have the policy and my house catches fire. Do you think I could call up an insurer and buy a policy to cover that preexisting condition? Not for $400. He might, however, sell me a policy on the spot for the replacement value of the house.
Or suppose I am on my deathbed enjoying (if that's the word) my last sunset. Do you think I could buy a $500,000 term life policy for, say, $2 K per annum?
Do you understand the concept of insurance? Do you see how this relevant to ObamaCare? If not, read this.
It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people — liberal, concerned with social justice — who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.
It is an uncomfortable position for many members of the creative classes to be in.
“We are the Obama people,” said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists.
“I’m for it,” she said. “But what is the reality of it?”
Meinwald and Sweeney are learning the hard way that rhetoric and reality are not the same; that central planning doesn't work; that hope and change and impossible dreams are no substitute for careful thought; that cautious, piecemeal reforms are better than "the fundamental transformation of America"; that being well-spoken is not the same as being intelligent; that being black does not qualify one for high office any more than it disqualifies one for it; that 'social justice' is code for collectivist redistribution by redistributors who are immune to the restrictions and hardships they impose on those they rule.
Meinwald, the lawyer, seems not to have exercised the 'due diligence' that such types speak of; how could she not know what to expect when she and her ilk had been warned again and again? And how could a lawyer think that the only way to achieve "better health care for all" is by an inefficient liberty-destroying socialist scheme?
We all want better health care for all. The question is how best to achieve it, and in such a way that it is not just affordable, but high quality and available and does not violate people's liberties or their consciences.
When liberals show that they have understood these simple points, then we can proceed.
This is worth reproducing; I came to essentially the same conclusion (emphasis added):
The viciousness with which this book [Mind and Cosmos] was received is, quite frankly, astonishing. I can understand why scientists don't like it; they're wary of philosophers trespassing on their terrain. But philosophers? What is philosophy except (1) the careful analysis of alternatives (i.e., logical possibilities), (2) the questioning of dogma, and (3) the patient distinguishing between what is known and what is not known (or known not to be) in a given area of human inquiry? Nagel's book is smack dab in the Socratic tradition. Socrates himself would admire it. That Nagel, a distinguished philosopher who has made important contributions to many branches of the discipline, is vilified by his fellow philosophers (I use the term loosely for what are little more than academic thugs) shows how thoroughly politicized philosophy has become. I find it difficult to read any philosophy after, say, 1980, when political correctness, scientism, and dogmatic atheism took hold in academia. Philosophy has become a handmaiden to political progressivism, science, and atheism. Nagel's "mistake" is to think that philosophy is an autonomous discipline. I fully expect that, 100 years from now, philosophers will look back on this era as the era of hacks, charlatans, and thugs. Philosophy is too important to be given over to such creeps.
One such creepy thug is this corpulent apparatchik of political correctness:
My title is intentionally hyperbolic and provocative, but not without justification given the outrageously vile (e.g., Martin Bashir) and breathtakingly mindless (e.g., Melissa Harris Perry) commentary encountered at liberal media outlets such as MSNBC. Here is a measured formulation of my question: To what extent does liberal ideology militate against sanity and moral decency in those who imbibe it, people who otherwise are basically sane and decent?
A philosophy doctoral student at an Ivy League institution e-mails,
In a recent post, you wrote:
Can one be both a liberal and a decent and sane human being? Or is scumbaggery as it were inscribed into the very marrow of the contemporary liberal? Or perhaps it is more like this: once liberalism infects a person's mind, the decency that was there is flushed out.
Actually, I have struggled with relatives of these questions for some time, and honestly don't know what to think. Many of the people I rub shoulders with are liberal to the bone. But I know well enough to say they're genuinely nice people--and smart people (some, for instance, are brilliant philosophers). At the same time, I find most of the liberal claptrap so intellectually inane and morally repugnant that I have a genuinely hard time seeing how anyone--much less these seemingly smart and decent people--can believe it. I don't know how to reconcile the two observations. Surely you know at least one intelligent, morally decent liberal. How do you fit their existence into your ontology? Or do we have an argument from queerness motivating us to become liberal error theorists? Would such a creature--assuming they can exist--present a peer-disagreement scenario, or cause you to lower your credence in your own beliefs?
My correspondent poses the puzzle of reconciling
1. Some liberals are genuinely nice and highly intelligent people
with
2. These same liberals subscribe to intellectually inane and morally repugnant beliefs.
What makes this aporetic dyad truly puzzling is that the limbs are individually plausible but appear collectively inconsistent. Let's consider an example.
I don't know Robert Paul Wolff personally, but I was favorably impressed by a couple of his books and I read his blog, The Philosopher's Stone, despite the fact that he often comes across as a stoned philosopher. He is no doubt very intelligent, and he seems like a nice guy. But he says things so preternaturally moronic that I am left scratching my head. Here is just one of several examples:
Why Do Conservatives Oppose ObamaCare?
Robert Paul Wolff has an answer for us. Ready? The bolding is Wolff's own and is twice-repeated:
Because Obama is Black.
Is Professor Wolff serious? I'm afraid he is. But given that the man is neither stupid nor the usual sort of left-wing moral scumbag, how could he be serious? What explains a view so plainly delusional? How account for an emotion-driven mere dismissal of the conservative position the arguments for which he will not examine? How is it that a professional philosopher, indeed a very good one, can engage in such puerile ad hominem psychologizing? Wolff himself provides an answer in a later post:
My knowledge of the beliefs and sentiments of those on the right is based entirely on things I have read or have seen on television. I have never had a conversation with a committed right-wing opponent of the Affordable Care Act, nor have I even, to the best of my knowledge, met one. You would be quite correct in inferring that I live in a left-wing bubble [called Chapel Hill -- before that, I lived in a left-wing bubble called Amherst, MA, and before that I lived in the right wing bubbles called Morningside Heights, Hyde Park, and Cambridge.] If this strikes you as disqualifying me from having an opinion, you are free to ignore the rest of this post.
Need I say more?
............
This is a perfect illustration of my correspondent's puzzle. In Robert Paul Wolff we have a man who is intelligent and (I will give him the benefit of the doubt) morally decent, but who maintains a thesis that is both delusional and morally repugnant in that it constitutes a slander on conservatives. What explains this? Wolff himself provides what may be the best explanation: he lives in a bubble. He doesn't know conservative positions, nor interact with conservatives. But isn't it a moral failure in one who is supposedly a truth-seeker simply to ignore whole swaths of opinion that run counter to one's own? Is that not a mark of intellectual dishonesty?
But the best explanation, in terms of his 'bubbly' isolation, is still not very good. How could anyone of his maturity and experience with the world of ideas, even one unfamiliar with conservatism, imagine for even a second that the cheap psychologizing he engages in could be on target?
It is Christmas time, and so, to be charitable I won't accuse Wolff of a moral failing; I'll just say that he and so many of his ilk are topically insane: their leftism has rendered them incapable of rational thought with respect to certain issues, race being a chief one among them.
For further discussion of Robert Paul 'Howlin'' Wolff, see below.
Here is an old Powerblogs post. It is reposted in my conviction that we must catalog and never forget the absurdities of the race-baiting Left.
...........
A while back, some fool from the Left coast — a Democrat party hack if memory serves — suggested that the name ‘Schwarzenegger’ was racist because of the ‘negger’ part. There was also the sly implication that the ‘racism of the name’ transferred onto its bearer. This slovenly pseudo-thinking is aided and abetted by the fact that schwarz is German for black. Hence, ‘black-nigger.’ Arnold Black-nigger.
To dispel this nonsense, note first that the German for ‘negro’ is not Negger, but Neger. Second, when ‘Schwarzenegger’ is compared with such similar names as ‘Heidegger,’ it becomes clear that ‘Schwarzenegger’ is to be parsed as Schwarzen-egger and not as Schwarze-negger.’ When I pointed this out to Horace Jeffery Hodges, he remarked that Egger is an early form of Acker, field. I suggested in turn that this is probably the origin of the English ‘acre.’ So if we must assign a meaning to Arnold’s name, it would be that of ‘black acre,’ or perhaps, ‘swarthy field.’
Now what about Heidegger? If we must assign a meaning to his name, I suggest that it is that of ‘heather field,’ or ‘heath acre,’ or perhaps, ‘pagan soil.’ Die Heide (feminine) means heather, heath, moor. . . while der Heide (masculine) means pagan. Given Heidegger’s association with the Blut und Boden ideology of the National Socialists — an association he never properly renounced — and the dark trends of his later thinking, ‘pagan soil’ may well be fitting.
Friday the 13th of the 12th month of the 13th year of the third millennium. I ain't superstitious, leastways no more than Willie Dixon, but two twin black tuxedo cats just crossed my path. All dressed up with nowhere to go. Nine lives and dressed to the nines. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Superstition. Guitar solo starts at 3:03. And of course you've heard the story about Niels Bohr and the horseshoe over the door:
A friend was visiting in the home of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, the famous atom scientist.
As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded:
“Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition! ? !”
“Of course not,” replied the scientist. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.”
Mr. Bill made a mistake the other night on The O'Reilly Factor when he said that the British skiffle group Mungo Jerry's sole Stateside hit, In the Summertime, is from '67. Not so, as I instantly recalled: it is from the summer of 1970. I remember because that was the summer I first read Kant, ploughing through The Critique of Pure Reason. I sat myself down under a tree in Garfield Park in South Pasadena with the Norman Kemp Smith translation and dove in. I couldn't make head nor tail of it. But I persisted and eventually wrote my dissertation on Kant.
Now why is Mr. Bill's mistake worth mentioning? Because, to paraphrase Santayana, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And we wouldn't want to repeat the '60s.
An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):
Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.
The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community. Talk of global community is blather. The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no extension of the pacific virtues is possible then humanity would seem to be doomed in an age of terrorism and WMDs. Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.
Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation. Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.) You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world. Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world. (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?) This is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.
The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.
This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world.
The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):
The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]
There is a tension between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen. As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.
What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order. This order is among the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.
Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops and others who confuse private and public morality.
Thanks for your blog; it's been many years since I studied Philosophy as an undergrad, but I've enjoyed your writing.
You cover many topics, but I'm curious why you haven't touched on feminism. You would seem to be well suited to offer a solid critique, and I get the sense that philosophers still in academia mostly don't want to touch it. David Benatar is one exception, and Roy Baumeister is another, although he is a psychologist. Of course being independent you get to think and write only about those topics that interest you. Maybe feminism isn't interesting, but I thought I'd ask.
Thank you for reading! Actually, feminism is touched upon (exactly the right word) in the following posts:
Although I am a conservative, I am not a 'throne and altar' conservative. Nor am I the sort of conservative who thinks that everything traditional trumps everything newfangled. (The conservative's presumption in favor of the traditional is defeasible.) And of course it is silly to think that conservatives oppose change; it is just that we don't confuse change with change for the better.
Traditionally, women were wives and mothers whose place was said to be the home. (Either that, or they lived with their parents or entered a nunnery.) Now the traditional wife and mother role is a noble one, and difficult to fill properly, and I have nothing but contempt for the feminazis who denigrate it and those who instantiate it. May a crapload of obloquy be dumped upon their shrill and febrile pates. But surely women have a right to actualize and employ their talents to the full in whichever fields they are suited to enter, however male-dominated those fields have been hitherto. They must, however, be suited to enter those fields: no differential standards, no gender-norming, no reverse discrimination.
Simone Weil, Edith Stein, and Elizabeth Anscombe are wonderfully good philosophers, and much better than most male philosophers. I know their works well and consider them to be my superiors both intellectually and morally. (And I don't think anyone would accuse me of a lack of self-esteem.) It would have been a loss to all of us had these admirable lights been prevented from developing their talents and publishing their thoughts.
This makes me something of a liberal in an old and defensible sense. But I don't use 'liberal' to describe my views because this word has suffered linguistic hijacking and now is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable in sense from 'leftist.' Anyone who reads this site soon learns that one of my self-appointed tasks is to debunk the pernicious buncombe of the Left. As someone who maintains a balanced and reasonable position -- does that sound a tad self-serving? -- I am open to attack from the PC-whipped leftists and from the reactionary, ueber-traditionalist, 'throne and altar' conservatives. To my amusement, I have been attacked from the latter side as a 'raving liberal.' (I respond in the appropriately appellated Am I a Raving Liberal?)
So much for a brief indication of where I stand wth respect to feminism.
Addendum (12/13). Phil Sheridan responds:
David Benatar in The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys makes a distinction between egalitarian feminism and partisan feminism that I believe is similar, if not identical, to Sommers's distinction between equity and gender feminism. He goes a step further than Sommers, however, and observes that, while egalitarian feminism exists as an idea, it is difficult to actually find it in the real world. He doesn't quite say it explicitly, but he implies that all feminism is partisan, meaning that it is always advocating for women without regard for the ideal of equality, and without regard for the impact on men, children or society at large.
I think he is correct, and there are countless examples of this. One is feminist opposition to equal child custody for fathers in the event of divorce. NOW has been steadfast on this since the late 70's for primarily because it provides a better divorce outcome for women. Feminists typically claim that the best interests of the child trumps equality in custody cases. They sometimes also make the absurd claim that fathers are often dangerous and might harm their children. In other cases, feminists cite historic injustice against women as a valid reason for sidestepping the ideal of equality in the here and now. And women outnumber men at American universities now, but instead of a call for re-balancing, we hear the argument that perhaps women have qualities that make them better candidates for jobs in the current economy.
You mention that women should not be prohibited from pursuing education/work that they are suited for, that we would have been denied the talents of Weil et al if we had not overturned the old sex restrictions. You're right, of course; no reasonable person could disagree with that.
BV comments: I would count The Thinking Housewife as a reasonable person, but she would seem to disagree with your agreement with me. See, for example, her Why We Must Discriminate. Here as elsewhere in the kingdom of ideas we find an astonishingly broad spectrum of opinion, from the gender feminist loons on the one end, to ultratraditionalists like our housewife on the other.
Feminism today goes far, far beyond that, however. I think Sommers's distinction is not enough -- it's making a cautious point when a thorough and aggressive assessment of the deep flaws in feminist theory and the advocacy it has spawned are required. At this point in our history it's like spitting into a hurricane, but it must be done.
If you lack identity, you are a nonentity. Quine's slogan ought to be emblazoned over every polling place in the land, and tattooed onto the forearm of every dumbass liberal by a method both Kafkaesque and painful.
The quotation below is genuine. I just checked. One can find it at the top of p. 116, first full paragraph, of Word and Object (MIT Press, 1960, eighth printing, February 1973). I slogged through the whole of it in 1974. Quine is no Aquinas. At his door one receives, not bread, but a stone.
The discussion of lying a few weeks ago proved fruitful. But lying is only one way to be untruthful. A full understanding of lying is possible only by comparison with, and contrast to, other forms of untruthfulness or mendacity. How many different forms are there? This post takes a stab at cataloging the forms. Some are special cases of others. The members of my elite commentariat will no doubt spot one or more of the following: incompleteness, redundancy, infelicity, ignorance of extant literature on the topic, and perhaps even utter wongheadedness, In which case I invite them to help me think better and deeper about this cluster of topics.
1. Lying proper. A paradigm case of a lie is a false statement made by a person with the intention of deceiving his audience, in the case of a spoken lie, or his readers in the case of a written lie. This is essentially the dictionary definition. I don't deny that there are reasonable objections one can make to it, some of which we have canvassed. We will come back to lying, but first let's get some other related phenonena under our logical microscopes.
2. Fibs. These are lies about inconsequential matters. Obama's recent brazen lies cannot therefore be correctly described as fibs. Every fib is a lie, but not every lie is a fib. Suppose you are a very wealthy, very absent-minded, and a very generous fellow. Suppose you loaned Tom $100 a few weeks ago but then couldn't remember whether it was $100 you loaned or $10. Tom gives $10 to Phil to give to you. Tom states to Phil, falsely, that $10 is what he (Tom) owes you. Tom's lie to Phil is a fib because rooking you out of $90 is an inconsequential matter, moneybags that you are.
3. White lies. A white lie might be defined as a false statement made with the intention to deceive, but without the intention to harm. A white lie would then be an innocuously deceptive false statement. Suppose I know Jane to be 70 years old, but she does not know that I know this. She asks me how old I think she is. I say , "60." I have made statement that I know to be false with the intention to deceive, but far from harming the addressee, I have made her feel good.
On this analysis, white lies are a species of lies, as are 'black' or malicious lies, and 'white' is a specifying adjective. But suppose you believe, not implausibly, that lying is analytically wrong, i.e., that moral wrongness is included in the concept of lying in the way moral wrongness is included in the concept of murder. If you believe this, then a white lie is not a lie, and 'white' is an alienans adjective. For then lying is necessarily wrong and white lies are impossible.
If a white lie is not a lie, it is still a form of untruthfulness.
3. Subornation of lying. It is one thing to lie, quite another to persuade another to lie. One can persuade another to lie without lying oneself. But if one does this one adds to the untruthfulness in the world. So subornation of lying is a type of untruthfulness.
4. Slander. I should think that every slanderous statement, whether oral or written, is a lie, but not conversely. So slandering is a species of lying. To slander a person is to make one or more false statements about the person with (i) the intention of deceiving the audience, and (ii) the intention of damaging the person's reputation or credibility.
One can lie about nonpersons. Obama's recent brazen lies are about the content of the so-called Affordable Care Act. But it seems that it is built into the concept of slander that if a person slanders x, then x is a person. But this is not perfectly obvious. Liberals slander conservatives when they call us racists, but do they slander our country when that call it institutionally racist?
Monokroussos and Lupu argued that a statement needn't be false to be a lie; it suffices for a statement to be a lie that it be believed by its maker to be false (and made with the intention to deceive). Well, what should we say about damaging statements that are true?
Suppose I find out that a neighbor is a registered sex offender. If I pass on this information with the intention of damaging the reputation of my neighbor, I have not slandered him. I have spoken the truth. In Catholic moral theology this is called detraction. The distinction between slander or calumny and detraction is an important one, but we needn't go further into this because detraction, though it is a form of maliciousness, is not a form of untruthfulness.
5. Malicious gossip. This may be distinct from both slander and detraction. Slander is false and damaging while detraction is true and damaging. Malicious gossip is the repetition of statements damaging to a person's reputation when the person who repeats them does not know or have good reason to believe that they are either true or false.
There is also a distinction among (i) originating a damaging statement, (ii) repeating a damaging statement, and (iii) originating a damaging statement while pretending to be merely repeating it.
6. Insincere promises. An insincere or false promise is one made by a person who has no intention of keeping it. As I have already argued in detail, promises, insincere or not, are not lies. Obama made no false promises; he lied about the extant content of the Obamacare legislation. But insincere promising is a form of untruthfulness insofar as it involves deceiving the addressee of the promise as to one's intentions with respect to one's future actions.
7. Bullshitting. Professor Frankfurt has expatiated rather fully on this topic. The bullshitter is one who 'doesn't give a shit' about the truth value of what he is saying. He doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience. Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them. More here.
8. Mixing untruths with truths. This is the sort of untruthfulness that results from failing to tell nothing but the truth.
9. Evasion. Refusing to answer questions because one doesn not want the whole truth known. Evasion is a form of untruthfulness that does not involve the making of false statements, but rather the failing to make true statements.
10. Linguistic hijacking and verbal obfuscation. A specialty of liberals. For example, the coining of question-begging epithets such as 'homophobia' and 'Islamophobia.' Orwellianisms: bigger government is smaller government; welfare dependency is self-reliance. More examples in Language Matters category.
11. Hypocrisy. Roughly, the duplicity of saying one thing and doing another. See Hypocrisy category for details.
12. Insincerity, bad faith, self-deception, phoniness, dissimulation. See Kant's Paean to Sincerity.
13. Exaggeration. Suppose I want to emphasize the primacy of practice over doctrine in religion. I say, "Religion is practice, not doctrine." What I say is false, and in certain sense irresponsible, but not a lie. Here are posts on exaggeration.
14. Understatement. "Thousands of Jews were gassed at Auschwitz." This is not false, but by understating the number murdered by the Nazis it aids and abets untruthfulness.
So much penetrating, fact-based critique from the conservative side, and what do lefties have by way of response? 'Obamacare' is a racist slur. The race card is all they have left.
When the president speaks now, few listen. He realizes that and so, like Richard Nixon, must add emphatics as a substitute for honesty. But by now we know ad nauseam all the banal intensifiers — “make no mistake about it,” “I am not kidding,” “in point of fact,” and “let me be perfectly clear.”
Obama is playing a strange game: The more he speaks untruthfully, the more he resorts to emphatic intensifiers that instead confirm that he is speaking untruthfully. In turn, Obama’s audiences play an even stranger game: The more they hear their president speak, the more they are impressed that he can sound so sincere in being so nonchalantly insincere and mellifluously misleading. When I first heard, “You can keep your doctor and your health plan,” I thought, “That can’t be true; he knows it can’t be true; and the American people must know it can’t be true” — and, then, I shrugged: “But he’s hit upon a winning lie.”
Many prominent liberals now consider verifiable ID requirements at polling places to constitute voter suppression. And of course their use of 'suppression' is normatively loaded: they pack a pejorative connotation into it. Voter suppression, as they use the phrase, is bad. Well then, do these liberals also think that requiring drivers to operate with valid licenses to be driver suppression in that same pejorative sense? If not, why not?
After all, to require certification of age and of minimal driving knowledge and skills limits the number of drivers just as an ID requirement at the polls limits the number of voters. But for either limitation to amount to suppression in a pejorative sense, the limitation would either have to be injurious or arbitrary or unnecessary or in some other way bad.
But obviously both forms of certification are necessary and reasonable and in no way bad and the discrimination they involve is legitimate. (See articles below if you really need arguments.)
So why do liberals label legitimate voting requirements as voter suppression? Because they want to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. They need people, citizens or not, alive or dead, to 'vote early and vote often' if they are going to win in close elections. If it is not close, they can't cheat; but if it is close then cheating is justified by the end, namely, winning. Or so they believe.
You won't understand the Left unless you understand that they lack the qualms of those of us brought up on 'bourgeois' morality, most of which is contained in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For a leftist, there is nothing wrong with lying and cheating if those are means judged necessary to achieve their end, namely, the victory of the Left and the destruction of the Rght. So they want as many potential leftists voting as possible regardless of citizenship status, age, or criminality.
You can bet that if actual or potential conservatives were involved in voter fraud, liberals would call for standards of ID to be ramped up to 'proctological' levels.
What I have just done is explain why liberals maintain the absurd view they maintain. It is perfectly comprehensible once you grasp that the point is to enable voter fraud. The arguments why their view is untenable are found in the some of the articles listed below.
It would be nice to be able to expect from popes and presidents a bit of gravitas, a modicum of seriousness, when they are instantiating their institutional roles. What they do after hours is not our business. So Pope Francis' clowning around does not inspire respect, any more than President Clinton's answering the question about his underwear. Remember that one? Boxers or briefs? He answered the question! All he had to do was calmly state, without mounting a high horse, "That is not a question that one asks the president of the United States." And now we have the Orwellian Prevaricator himself in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose latest Orwellian idiocy is that Big Government is the problem, not him, even though he is the the poster boy, the standard bearer, like unto no one before him in U. S. history, of Big Government!
But I digress. Here are a couple of important points in rebuttal of Francis (emphasis added):
To begin, we note that “trickle-down” economics is a caricature used by capitalism’s critics and not its defenders. Those of us who embrace free markets do so not out of a belief that the breadcrumbs of affluence will eventually reach those less well-off, but, rather, out of a conviction that the free market is the best mechanism for increasing wealth at all levels. As for being confirmed by the facts, we believe the empirical evidence is conclusive. Compare the two sides of Germany during the era of the Berlin Wall or the China of today with the China that hadn’t yet embraced an (admittedly imperfect) form of capitalism. The results are not ambiguous.
To this I would add that it is a mistake to confuse material inequality with poverty. Which is better: everyone being equal but poor, or inequality that makes 'the poor' better off than they would have been been without the inequality? Clearly, the second. After all, there is nothing morally objectionable about inequality as such. Or do you think that there is a problem with my net worth's being considerably less than Bill Gates'? There is nothing wrong with inequality as such; considerations of right and wrong kick in only when there is doubt about the legality or morality of the means by which the wealth was acquired. My net worth exceeds that of a lot of people from a similar background, but that merely reflects the fact that I practice the old virtues of frugality, etc., avoid the vices that impoverish, and make good use of my talents. I know how to save, invest, and defer gratification. I know how to control my appetites. The relative wealth that results puts me in a position to help other people, by charitable giving, by hiring them, and by paying taxes that fund welfare programs and 'entitlements.' When is the last time a poor person gave someone a job, or made a charitable contribution? And how much tax do they pay? There are makers and takers, and you can't be a giver unless you are a maker, any more than you can be a taker if there are no givers. So, far from inequality being the same as poverty or causing poverty, it lessens poverty, both by providing jobs and via charity, not to mention the 'entitlement' and welfare programs that are funded by taxes paid by the productive.
You don't like the fact that someone has more than you? Then you are guilty of the sin of envy. And I think that Francis is aware that envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Here is a question for socialists, redistributionists, collectivists, Obaminators: Is your redistributionism merely an expression of envy? I am not claiming that envy is at the root of socialism. That is no more the case than that greed (also on the list of Seven Deadlies) is at the root of capitalism. But it is the case that some socialists are drawn to socialism because of their uncontrollable envy, a thoroughly destructive vice.
There’s a more fundamental misunderstanding at work here, however. When Francis talks about “economic power,” he misapprehends a fundamental aspect of free markets – they only provide power consensually. Apart from government, no one can force you to buy a product or purchase a service. There’s a similar error in his citation of Saint John Chrysostom’s aphorism: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood.” The economics of capitalism are not zero-sum. Trade only occurs when both sides are made better off by the transaction. The wealthy don’t get rich at the expense of the poor.
Lefties hate business and especially big corporations. I give the latter no pass if they do wrong or violate reasonable regulations. But has Apple or Microsoft ever incarcerated anyone, or put anyone to death, or started a shooting war, or forced anyone to buy anything or to violate his conscience as the Obama administration is doing via its signature abomination, Obamacare?
On the other hand, did the government provide me with the iPad Air I just bought? You didn't build that, Obama! Not you, not your government, not any government. High tech does not come from politicians or lawyers, two classes that are nearly the same -- yet another problem to be addressed in due course.
Be intellectually honest, you lefties. Don't turn a blind eye to the depredations of Big Government while excoriating (sometimes legitimately) those of Big Business.
Some object to the popular 'Obamacare' label given that the official title of the law is 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act' or, as commonly truncated, 'Affordable Care Act.' But there is a good reason to favor the popular moniker: it is descriptive where the other two labels are evaluative, expressing as they do a pro attitude toward the bill.
Will the law really protect patients? That is an evaluative judgment based on projections many regard as flimsy. Will the law really make health care affordable? And for whom? Will care mandated for all be readily available and of high quality?
Everybody wants affordable and readily available health care of high quality for the greatest number possible. Note the three qualifiers: affordable, readily available, high quality. The question is how best to attain this end. The 'Affordable Care Act' label begs the question as to whether or not Obama's bill will achieve the desired end. 'Obamacare' does not. It is, if not all that descriptive, at least evaluatively neutral.
If Obama's proposal were referred to as "Socialized Medicine Health Care Act' or 'Another Step Toward the Nanny State Act,' people would protest the negative evaluations embedded in the titles. Titles of bills ought to be neutral.
So, if you are rational, you will not find anything derogatory about 'Obamacare.' But liberals are not known for being particularly rational. But they are known for playing the the race card in spades. (See my Race category for plenty of examples.) And if the liberal in questions hosts for that toxic leftist outlet, MSNBC, then 'morally obnoxious' can be added to the description. So the following comes as no particular surprise:
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry went off on a tangent in a recent broadcast, ranting about the racist overtones of a word that’s been used for years by both sides of the political aisle — Obamacare.
“I want to talk today about a controversial word,” she said, as FrontPageMag.com reported. “It’s a word that’s been with us for years. And like it or not, it’s indelibly printed in the pages of America history. A word that was originally intended as a derogatory term, meant to shame and divide and demean. The word was conceived by a group of wealthy white men who needed a way to put themselves above and apart from a black man — to render him inferior and unequal and diminish his accomplishments.”
Slanderous and delusional.
So the question arises once again: Can one be both a liberal and a decent and sane human being? Or is scumbaggery as it were inscribed into the very marrow of the contemporary liberal? Or perhaps it is more like this: once liberalism infects a person's mind, the decency that was there is flushed out. Need an example? Try Martin Bashir on for size. Or Keith Olbermann. (At the end of the hyperlink I defend Dennis Prager against Olbermann's vicious and stupid attack.)
I suppose I should say at least one good thing about MSNBC: both of the these leftist scumbags got the axe.
By the way, 'scumbag' is a derogatory word and is intended as such. But you knew that already. It is important to give leftists a taste of their own medicine in the perhaps forlorn hope that someday, just maybe, they will see the error of their ways and learn how to be civil. Civility is for the civil, not for assholes. 'Assholicity' for assholes.
It is simply a fact about human nature that few are able to make good use of free time, 'leisure' time. Provide them with it and they 'go to seed' in no time, following the path of least resistance ever downward. The classical concept of leisure. not to be confused with 'leisure,' as the former is explained by Josef Pieper in his Leisure: The Basis of Culture is not understood and few have the self-discipline nowadays to live a life that is leisurely in the classical sense. What we can expect thanks to Obama and his ever-increasing infantilization of the populace via his promotion of welfare dependency and 'free' health care is more social pathology, more tattoos, more drug use, more mindless texting and sexting and high-tech time-wasting. As the government grows bigger, the citizen grows smaller, weaker, and less self-reliant so that he needs ever more government to feed, clothe, shelter, and wipe his butt for him, the mediating institutions of civil society (see article below) having been weakened if not destroyed by big government and its liberal-fascist initiatives.
It is now a requirement of Obamacare that every Catholic institution larger than a single church — and even including some single churches — must pay for contraceptives, sterilization, and morning-after abortifacients for its employees. Each of these is directly contrary to the Catholic faith. But the Obama administration does not care. They have said, in effect, Do what we tell you — or else.
If that isn't liberal fascism, what would be? Now I can't expect a morally obtuse liberal to appreciate what is wrong wth the killing of innocent human beings who just happen to be prenatal, but you would think that liberals, of all people, would understand what is wrong with forcing people to support what they, in their serious and deeply considered judgment, consider to be a grave moral evil.
“Work” and “purpose” are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray in a speech in 2009. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors – even more to the lives of janitors – as it does to the lives of CEOs.” Self-reliance – “work” – is intimately connected to human dignity – “purpose.”
So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps. The assumption is that mass, multigenerational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever-smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be either a member of the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without “work and purpose” is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neofeudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be “economic inequality,” but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.
One wouldn’t expect the governing class to be as farsighted as visionaries like Bezos. But it’s hard to be visionary if you’re pointing in the wrong direction. Which is why the signature achievement of Obama’s “hope and change” combines 1940s British public health theories with 1970s Soviet supermarket delivery systems. But don’t worry: Maybe one day soon, your needle-exchange clinic will be able to deliver by drone. Look out below.
William Sloane Coffin has this to say on p. 56 of Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004): "We cannot legislate morality, only the conditions conducive to morality." To combine three serious mistakes in one short sentence is quite a trick.
First, since we do legislate morality, it follows that we can.
Second, if Coffin is saying that we ought not legislate morality, then he is saying that we ought not have laws, since all laws legislate morality.
Third, it is false that we can legislate the conditions conducive to morality. Among the conditions of morality (moral behavior) are freedom of the will and knowledge of right and wrong and of their difference. Obviously these things fall outside of the scope of legislation. What Coffin wants to say is that we can only legislate certain conditions external to the agent, which, if they were to obtain, would lead to morally correct behavior. Well, nothing can lead to, in the sense of determine, morally correct behavior since free will is involved; but I grant that if everyone had a well-paying job that would reduce the incidence of crime. Unfortunately, the government cannot legislate jobs into existence.
In the same paragraph, we read this amazing sentence: "Economics are [sic] not a science; they [sic] are only politics in disguise." Is this to say that economic phenomena (buying, selling, bartering, etc.) are really political phenomena? That is obviously false: there could be economic phenomena even if there were no state (polis). Is it to say that economics as the study of economic phenomena is reallyjust political science? That too is plainly false. Perhaps Coffin is merely making the trivial point that economic pronouncements are liable to be influenced by political considerations. If that is what he means, he should say it instead of saying something idiotic.
I am sorry to have to report that his book is filled with similar nonsense.
Walter Williams talks sense as usual (emphasis added):
Obama's electoral success is truly a remarkable commentary on the goodness of the American people. A 2008 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll reported "that 17 percent were enthusiastic about Obama being the first African American President, 70 percent were comfortable or indifferent, and 13 percent had reservations or were uncomfortable." I'm 77 years old. For almost all of my life, a black's becoming the president of the United States was at best a pipe dream. Obama's electoral success further confirms what I've often held: The civil rights struggle in America is over, and it's won. At one time, black Americans did not have the constitutional guarantees enjoyed by white Americans; now we do. The fact that the civil rights struggle is over and won does not mean that there are not major problems confronting many members of the black community, but they are not civil rights problems and have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination.
There is every indication to suggest that Obama's presidency will be seen as a failure similar to that of Jimmy Carter's. That's bad news for the nation but especially bad news for black Americans. No white presidential candidate had to live down the disgraced presidency of Carter, but I'm all too fearful that a future black presidential candidate will find himself carrying the heavy baggage of a failed black president. That's not a problem for white liberals who voted for Obama -- they received their one-time guilt-relieving dose from voting for a black man to be president -- but it is a problem for future generations of black Americans. But there's one excuse black people can make; we can claim that Obama is not an authentic black person but, as The New York Times might call him, a white black person.
Here. I answered 32 out of 32 questions correctly. If you are feeling a little too merry this season and want to bring yourself down a bit, administer it to your students and see what happens.
We humans naturally philosophize. But we don't naturally philosophize well. So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it. (See my Scientism category for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the institutionalized discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles. Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function. But now on to the topic.
..............
Is there extraterrestrial life?
To answer this question, one would have to have at least a rough idea of what counts as living and what counts as nonliving. For example, "A working definition lately used by NASA is that 'life is a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution.'"
In a recent Scientific American article, Why Life Does not Really Exist, problems with the NASA definition are pointed out. I won't try to evaluate the putative counterexamples the author adduces, but simply assume that the NASA definition is not adequate. Indeed, I will assume something even stronger, namely, that no adequate definition is available, no razor-sharp definition, no set of properties that all and only living things possess, no set of properties that cleanly demarcates the animate from the inanimate, and is impervious to counterexample.
Supposing that is so, what could explain it? According to the Scientific American article (emphasis added) what explains the difficulty of defining life is that life does not really exist! It can't be defined because it is not there to be defined. You heard right, boys and girls:
Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.
This startling passage provokes a couple of questions.
The first is whether the author's conclusion, which we may take to be the conjunction of the bolded sentences, follows from the difficulty or even the impossibility of finding an adequate definition of life. The answer is: obviously not! One cannot conclude that nothing is living from the fact, if it is a fact, that it is difficult or even impossible to say what exactly all and only living things have in common that makes them living as opposed to nonliving. That would be like arguing that nothing is a game (to invoke Wittgenstein's overworked example) because there is nothing that all and only games have in common that distinguishes them from non-games. There are games and there are non-games and this is so whether or not one can say exactly what distinguishes them.
Not all concepts are such that necessary and sufficient conditions for their correct application can be specified. There are vague concepts, family-resemblance concepts, open-textured concepts. The concept bald, the concept game, the concept art. Their being vague, etc., does not prevent them from having clear instances and clear non-instances. A man with no hair on his head is bald. Your humble and hirsute correspondent is most definitely not bald. The fact that we don't know what to say about Donald 'Comb-Over' Trump does not change the fact that some of us assuredly are and some of assuredly not.
The second question is whether the author's conclusion, namely, that life is a concept that we have invented is even coherent. It isn't. I'll give two arguments. I beg the indulgence of those readers who will feel that I am wasting my time and yours with the dialectical equivalent of rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. I agree that in general there is something faintly absurd about responding to a position whose preposterousness renders it beneath refutation.
A. If life does not exist, but is a mere concept we have invented, then a fortiori consciousness does not exist and is a mere concept we have invented. For if the difficulties in defining life are a reason for thinking there is no life, then the difficulties in defining consciousness are a reason to deny that there is consciousness. For example, there appears to be something very much like intentionality below the level of conscious mentality in the phenomena of potentiality and dispositionality. (See Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy.) This causes trouble for Brentano's claim that intentionality is the mark of the consciously mental. But it would surely be absurd to deny the existence of consciousness on the ground that defining it is not easy. There is a second point. Those of a naturalist bent are highly likely to maintain, with John Searle, that either conscousness is a biological phenomenon or at least cannot exist except in living organisms. So if there is no life, then there is no consciousness either.
But only conscious beings wield concepts. Only conscious beings classify and subsume and judge. So if there is no life, there are no concepts either, and thus no concept of life. Therefore, life cannot be a concept. It is incoherent to suppose that a lifeless material object could classify some other objects in its environment as living and others as nonliving.
Moreover, if consciousness does not exist, but is a mere concept we conscious beings have invented, then obviously consciousness is not a mere concept we have invented but rather the presupposition of there being any concepts at all. The notion that consciousness is a mere concept is self-refuting.
B. The author tell us that "What differentiates molecules of water, rocks, and silverware from cats, people and other living things is not 'life,' but complexity.
Note how the author takes back with his left hand what he has proferred with his right. He appeals to the difference between the nonliving and the living only to imply that there is no difference, the only difference being one of material complexity. But a difference between what and what? Now if he were maintaining that life emerges at a certain level of material complexity he would be maintaining something that, though not unproblematic, would at least not be incoherent. For then he would not be denying that life exists but affirming that it is an emergent phenomenon. But he is plainly not an emergentist, but an eliminativist. He is saying that life simply does not exist.
If the difference between the nonliving and the living is the difference between the less complex and the more complex, then actually infinite sets in mathematics are alive. For they are 'infinitely' complex. If you say that only material systems can be alive,, but no abstracta, what grounds your assertion? If life is a concept we impose, why can't we impose it on anything we like, including actually infinite sets of abstracta? Presumably we cannot do this because of the nature of sets and the nature of life where these natures are logically antecedent to us and our conceptual impositions. Sets by their very nature are nonliving. But then appeal is being made to what lies beyond the reach of conceptual decision, which is to say: life exists and is what it is independently of us, our language, and our conceptualizations. One cannot argue from our poor understanding of what life is to its nonexistence.
The fallacy underlying this very bad Scientific American piece could be called the eliminativist fallacy. An eliminativist is one who, faced with a problem he cannot solve -- in this case the problem of crafting an adequate definition of life -- simply denies one or more of the data that give rise to the problem. Thus, in this case, the author simply denies that life exists. But then he denies the very datum that got him thinking about this topic in the first place.
John Hawkins argues that it is in a recent Townhall piece. I agree with everything he says, except the title. It suffices to argue that liberalism is wrong. It is irrelevant whether it is on the right or wrong side of history. Allow me to explain.
The phrase "on the wrong side of history" is one that no self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. The phrase suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and these outcomes are somehow justified by the actual tendency of events. But how can the mere fact of a certain drift justify that drift? For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty and personal choice, Obamacare being the latest and worst example. This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power. Would a self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it? I think not.
But if not, then one cannot argue against liberalism by trying to show that it is on the wrong side of history. For which way history goes is irrelevant to which way it ought to go.
'Everyone today believes that such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is true. 'Everyone now does such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such ought to be done. 'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. In each of these cases there is a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, or values from facts.
One who opposes the drift toward socialism, a drift that is accelerating under President Obama, is arguably, pace Hawkins, on the wrong side of history. But that is no objection unless one assumes that history's direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that, one for whom all the real is rational and all the rational real. Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it. But no conservative who understands conservatism can believe it.
One night a conservative talk show host told a guest that she was on the wrong side of history in her support for same-sex marriage. My guess is that in a generation the same-sex marriage issue will be moot, the liberals having won. The liberals will have been on the right side of history. The right side of history, but wrong nonetheless.
It's why Congress has an approval rating of 6%. It's why Obamacare is wildly unpopular. It's why D.C. and our court system have devolved into partisan warfare. It's because liberalism is a non-functional, imperious philosophy that is out of step with the modern world and on the wrong side of history.
Hawkins thinks it is a point against liberalism that it is on the wrong side of history. But whether it is or not is irrelevant -- unless one assumes what no conservative ought to assume, namely, that success justifies, or that might makes right, or that consensus proves truth, or that the way things are going is the way things ought to be going.
As I have said more than once, if you are a conservative don't talk like a [insert favorite expletive] liberal. Don't validate, by adopting, their question-begging epithets and phrases.
For example, if you are a conservative and speak of 'homophobia' or 'Islamophobia' or 'social justice,' then you are an idiot who doesn't realize that the whole purpose of those polemical leftist neologisms is to beg questions, shut down rational discussion, and obfuscate.
Language matters in general, but especially in the culture wars.
I just wasted 30 minutes on the phone with a customer service representative straightening out a screw-up emanating from their end. The automated intro said that a "helpful customer care" rep would be available in one minutes (sic)." Don't tell me how helpful and caring you are. Just do your job and do it right.
This change from 'service' to 'care' is squishy, bien-pensant liberal feel-good bullshit and quite in keeping wth the Age of Feeling, the Age of Obama Yomama. It's humbug I tell you, humbug!
Liberals are for the rule of law when it suits their collectivist, big government agenda, but only then. Peter Berkowitz:
The left-liberal mindset endemic on the college faculties and law schools where Barack Obama’s political sensibilities were forged holds that morals and politics are subject to a universal reason to which the left-liberal sensibility is uniquely attuned. This conceit receives expression in a faith that the left-liberal brain trust can embody complex public policy in general rules and regulations, which can then be administered smoothly by well-educated bureaucrats and adjudicated impartially by empathetic judges.
At the same time, the left-liberal mind rebels against established authorities, hierarchies, and formalities that constrain its ability to pursue the people’s good and social justice -- at least as it understands them.
Often enough, this rebellion turns against laws duly enacted by left-liberals themselves. Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal are now demonstrating the destabilizing consequences of governing in accordance with a love-hate relationship toward the law.
I've been asking myself a question these last years. Why did we expend so much treasure to defeat the Evil Empire, the USSR? To become another, albeit lesser, evil empire, the United Socialist States of America?
But if one needs institutionalized religion, one could do far worse, assuming one can stomach the secular-humanist liberal namby-pambification and wussification that the post-Vatican II church can't seem to resist, the dilution of doctrine and tradition that empties into the nauseating Church of Nice.
There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.
Still, religion would have its immanent life-enhancing role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'
People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists. The church should be a liberal-free zone.
For Obamacare to work, the young must sign up. But will they? Why should they? Jeffrey H. Anderson:
In its government-run exchanges, Obamacare raises premiums for the young by suspending actuarial science. It forbids insurers from considering some variables that are actuarially relevant to health care, such as sex and health, while also limiting their ability to take age into account in an actuarially based way. Under ordinary principles of insurance, a healthy young person pays a lot less than a person nearing retirement. Under Obamacare, that’s not so. Yet President Obama’s centerpiece legislation depends upon young people’s willingness to pay these artificially inflated premiums.
Another reason the young are unlikely to show up in sufficient numbers is that Obamacare gives many of them an easy out: They can stay on their parents’ insurance free of charge until they’re 26. As for the rest, with the elimination of preexisting conditions as a barrier to buying health insurance, many will choose to go without coverage until they’re sick or injured.
In other words, Obama-care makes insurance more costly while simultaneously making it less necessary—especially for the young.
You ought to read the entire piece, especially if you are young and healthy.
The more I know about Obamacare, the more crack-brained (you can take that word in two senses) it appears. The burden of redistribution is to be borne by the young, precisely those least capable of carrying it.
This is an extremely penetrating analysis, worthy of careful study. Excerpt (emphasis added):
Again, note the nature of the “foremost” ideological mandate: if Muslim nations do not feel “good” about their historical contributions to science and engineering, such depression could not be attributed to their present scientific ossification or Islam’s often historical subordination to Western science, especially after the fifteenth century. Instead, the discontent over the absence of scientific parity might be due to other more nefarious causes—and thus in part rectified by the power, wealth, and influence of a properly sensitive U.S. federal government.
Similarly, homeland security is no longer just about ensuring the safety of the United States. In a series of bizarre euphemisms—overseas contingency operations, man-caused disasters, work-place violence—Islamic terrorism was redefined as a spontaneous tragedy without specified causation. To the degree that the issue of radical Islam was unavoidable in the debate over U.S. domestic and foreign policy, the contortions only grew worse: we should not allow the mass murderer Major Hasan to prejudice the Army’s diversity program; the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely secular; and jihad is a legitimate tenet of Islam properly characterized as a “holy struggle,” and therefore improperly associated with radical Islamic terrorists.
The politicization of almost every aspect of American culture and politics over the last five years could easily be expanded. Traditional employment background checks are now “racist” given that minorities with higher crime records might be unduly affected. The 2009 reordering of the Chrysler creditors leap-frogged junior union creditors over senior bondholders—as enforcement of existing legislation becomes predicated on perceptions of social justice rather than faithfully executing settled laws on the books. Each new tropical storm launches a fresh debate about “climate change,” despite no evidence that recent weather is more prone to hurricanes or the planet has heated up over the last 15 years. Almost every new mass shooting offers occasion for mobilization to enhance existing gun control legislation.
1. Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional character
means
2. Someone made up a story about a person called ‘Sherlock Holmes.'
I don't think this is right. Even if (1) and (2) are intersubstitutable salva veritate in all actual and possible contexts, they are not intersubstitutable salva significatione. They are not intersubstitutable in such a manner as to preserve meaning or sense. (1) and (2) don't have the same meaning.
First of all, it is not in dispute that Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional person, unlike, say, the 19th century American chess prodigy, Paul Morphy, who is the main character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players. (Available from Amazon.com for only a penny! The perfect Christmas gift from and to impecunious chess players.) A fictional object need not be a nonexistent object: Morphy is a fictional object inasmuch as he figures in the novel just mentioned, but he existed. Holmes never existed and never will. Hence the need to distinguish between the purely fictional and the fictional, and the fictional and the nonexistent.
Now let us assume that some fom of 'creationism' or 'artifactualism' is true: purely fictional objects are the mental creations of finite minds, human or not. They are literally made up, thought up, excogitated, invented not discovered. They are literally ficta (from L. fingere). On this approach, internally logically consistent ficta cannot be reduced to real, albeit mere, possibilia. For the merely possible belongs to the real, and cannot be made up; the purely fictional, however, is unreal and made-up.
Let us further assume that artifactualism about purely fictional items, if true, is true of metaphysical necessity. It will then be the case that (1) and (2) will be either both true or both false across all possible worlds. But they don't have the same meaning since one who understands (1) may easily reject (2) by holding some other theory of fictional objects, say, a Meinongian theory according to which Sherlock Holmes and his colleagues are mind-independent nonentities.
London Ed is making the following mistake. He thinks that 'x is mind-made' follows analytically from 'x is purely fictional' in the way that (to introduce a brand-new example) 'x is male' follows analytically from 'x is a bachelor.' 'Tom is a bachelor' and 'Tom is an umarried adult male' have the same meaning; the latter merely unpacks or makes explicit the meaning of the former. But (2) does not unpack the meaning of (1): it goes beyond it. It adds the controversial idea that purely fictional objects have no status whatsoever apart from the mental activities of novelists and other artistically creative persons.
Ed may be misled by the etymology of 'fictional.' Pace Heidegger, etymology is no sure guide to philosophical insight.
If you say that Tom is a bachelor but not an unmarried adult male, then you contradict yourself, not formally, but materially. But if you affirm both (1) and the negation of (2), then you involve yourself in no sort of contradiction. Some maintain that purely fictional objects are mind-created abstract objects. People who hold this do not violate the meaning of (1).
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