Maverick Philosopher

Stella Morabito on the "Feral" Michelle Wolf

'Feral' is precisely the word for this disgusting leftist.  The vile specimen cannot seem to distinguish between being foul-mouthed and being funny. There is no humor in what she said. Succeding as a scum bag, she fails as a comedienne.

She actually joked about abortion in the crudest terms imaginable. "Don't knock it if you haven't tried it." And then something about knocking the baby out. But she missed the one pun in the vicinity, 'being knocked up' as a slang phrase for 'being pregnant.'

Even the left-wing 'journalists' present thought Wolf's trangressivity excessive.

 

Pretense and Aspiration

How much of pretense is in aspiration, and aspiration in pretense?

Addicted to Food?

This is a re-post (re-entry?) from 9 December 2009.  Re-posts are the re-runs of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode only once, do you?  The message delivered below is very important and needs be repeated and repeated again.

..................

Can one be addicted to food? If yes, then I am addicted to exposing liberal nonsense. What I have said more than once about the non-addictiveness of tobacco can be applied mutatis mutandis to food 'addiction':

To confuse psychological habituation with addiction is conceptual slovenliness. Addiction, if it means anything definite, has to involve (i) a physiological dependence (ii) on something harmful to the body (iii) removal of which would induce serious withdrawal symptoms. One cannot be addicted to nose-picking, to running, to breathing, or to caffeine. Furthermore, (iv) it is a misuse of language to call a substance addictive when only a relatively small number of its users develop — over a sufficient period of time with sufficient frequency of use — a physical craving for it that cannot be broken without severe withdrawal symptoms. Else one would have to call peanuts toxic because a tiny number of people have severe allergic reactions to them. Heroin is addictive; nicotine is not. To think otherwise is to use ‘addiction’ in an unconscionably loose way.

Avoiding loose talk in serious contexts is a good part of proper intellectual hygiene.

Liberals and leftists engage in this loose talk for at least two reasons.

First, it aids them in their denial of individual responsibility. They would divest individuals of responsibility for their actions, displacing it onto factors, such as ‘addictive’ substances, external to the agent. Their motive is to grab more power for themselves by increasing the size and scope of government: the less self-reliant and responsible individuals are, the more they need the nanny state and people like Hillary, who gives some evidence of aspiring to be Nanny-in-Chief.

Second, loose talk of ‘addiction’ fits in nicely with what I call their misplaced moral enthusiasm. Incapable of appreciating a genuine issue such as partial-birth abortion, they invest their moral energy in pseudo-issues.

The main point is that tobacco products can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways, just as alcoholic beverages can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways. I have never met a cigarette yet that killed anybody. One has to smoke them, one has to smoke a lot of them over many years, and each time you light up it is a free decision.

Some people feel that all smokers are irrational. This too is nonsense, if we are talking about means-ends rationality. Someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes per day is assuming a serious health risk. But it may well be that the pleasure and alertness the person receives from smoking is worth the risk within the person’s value scheme.

Different people evaluate the present in its relation to the future in different ways. I tend to sacrifice the present for the future, thereby deferring gratification. Hence my enjoyment of the noble weed is abstemious indeed, consisting of an occasional load of pipe tobacco, or an occasional cigar. (I recommend the Arturo Fuente ‘Curly Head’ Maduro: cheap, but good.) But I would not think to impose my abstemiousness, or time-preference, on anyone else.

Can one be addicted to food? If yes, then I am addicted to exposing liberal nonsense. What I have said more than once about the non-addictiveness of tobacco can be applied mutatis mutandis to food 'addiction':

To confuse psychological habituation with addiction is conceptual slovenliness. Addiction, if it means anything definite, has to involve (i) a physiological dependence (ii) on something harmful to the body (iii) removal of which would induce serious withdrawal symptoms. One cannot be addicted to nose-picking, to running, to breathing, or to caffeine. Furthermore, (iv) it is a misuse of language to call a substance addictive when only a relatively small number of its users develop — over a sufficient period of time with sufficient frequency of use — a physical craving for it that cannot be broken without severe withdrawal symptoms. Else one would have to call peanuts toxic because a tiny number of people have severe allergic reactions to them. Heroin is addictive; nicotine is not. To think otherwise is to use ‘addiction’ in an unconscionably loose way.

Avoiding loose talk in serious contexts is a good part of proper intellectual hygiene.

Liberals and leftists engage in this loose talk for at least two reasons.

First, it aids them in their denial of individual responsibility. They would divest individuals of responsibility for their actions, displacing it onto factors, such as ‘addictive’ substances, external to the agent. Their motive is to grab more power for themselves by increasing the size and scope of government: the less self-reliant and responsible individuals are, the more they need the nanny state and people like Hillary, who gives some evidence of aspiring to be Nanny-in-Chief.

Second, loose talk of ‘addiction’ fits in nicely with what I call their misplaced moral enthusiasm. Incapable of appreciating a genuine issue such as partial-birth abortion, they invest their moral energy in pseudo-issues.

The main point is that tobacco products can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways, just as alcoholic beverages can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways. I have never met a cigarette yet that killed anybody. One has to smoke them, one has to smoke a lot of them over many years, and each time you light up it is a free decision.

Some people feel that all smokers are irrational. This too is nonsense, if we are talking about means-ends rationality. Someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes per day is assuming a serious health risk. But it may well be that the pleasure and alertness the person receives from smoking is worth the risk within the person’s value scheme.

Different people evaluate the present in its relation to the future in different ways. I tend to sacrifice the present for the future, thereby deferring gratification. Hence my enjoyment of the noble weed is abstemious indeed, consisting of an occasional load of pipe tobacco, or an occasional cigar. (I recommend the Arturo Fuente ‘Curly Head’ Maduro: cheap, but good.) But I would not think to impose my abstemiousness, or time-preference, on anyone else.

Addiction is not a Disease

The liberal wussification initiative needs ever more victims, ever more government dependents, and ever more sick people.  Hence the trend in this therapeutic society to broaden  the definition of 'disease' to cover what are obviously not diseases.  Need more patients?  Define 'em into existence!  Theodore Dalrymple talks sense:

There are cheap lies and expensive lies, and the lie that addiction is a disease just like any other will prove to be costly. It is the lie upon which Washington has based its proposed directive that insurance policies should cover addiction and mental disorders in the same way as they cover physical disease. The government might as well decriminalize fraud while it is at it.

The evidence that addiction is not a disease like any other is compelling, overwhelming, and obvious. It has also been available for a long time. The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s definition of addiction as a “chronic, relapsing brain disease” is about as scientific as the advertising claims for Coca-Cola. In fact, it had its origin as a funding appeal to Congress.

To take only one point among many: most addicts who give up do so without any medical assistance—and most addicts do give up. Moreover, they do so at an early age. The proximate cause of their abstinence is their decision to be abstinent. No one can decide not to have rheumatoid arthritis, say, or colon cancer. Sufferers from those diseases can decide to cooperate or not with treatment, but that is another matter entirely. Therefore, there is a category difference between addiction and real disease.

Read it all.

The Multiverse Idea: Does it Help with the Question 'Why Something Rather than Nothing?'

If 'universe' refers to the totality of what exists in space-time, then there can be only one universe. Call that the ontological use of 'universe.' On that use, which accords with etymology and common sense, there cannot be multiple universes or parallel universes. But if 'universe' refers to the totality of what we can 'see' (empirically detect) with our best telescopes in all directions out to around 14 billion light-years -- call that the epistemological use of the term -- then it is a reasonable speculation that there are many such universes. 

After all, it is epistemically possible -- possible for all we know -- that there are other self-contained spatio-temporal regions beyond our current ken.  Let's run with the speculation.

These many universes would then make up the one actual universe (in the ontological sense) which we can now call the multiverse: one universe with many spatio-temporally disconnected regions each with its origin in its own big bang.

Some journalists succumb to the conflation of the MODAL notion of possible worlds with the COSMOLOGICAL notion of a multiplicity of universes. These need to be kept distinct.

If there are many physical universes, as some cosmologists speculate, they are parts of total physical reality, albeit spatio-temporally disconnected parts thereof, and therefore parts of the total way things are, using 'are' tenselessly.  But the total way things are is just what we mean by the actual world.  To invoke the Tractarian Wittgenstein, "The [actual] world is all that is the case." "The [actual] world is the totality of facts not of things."  The actual world is the total (maximal) way things are, and merely possible worlds are total ways things could have been.  Therefore, if there are many physical universes, they are all  'located within' the actual world in the sense that they are all parts of what is actually the case. 

In other words, each universe in the multiverse is a huge chunk of actuality; universes other than ours are not merely possible.  They are actually out there beyond our ken. So it is a mistake to refer to the universes in the multiverse as possible worlds.  This should be obvious from the fact that there is a possible world in which there are no universes beyond the one we 'see.'  Obviously, this possible world is not identical to a physical universe beyond the reach of our telescopes.

Now suppose we want an answer to the question, Why is there anything physical at all, and not rather nothing physical at all? Does the multiverse idea help with this question?

Not in the least. 

First of all, we can ask the same question about the multiverse that we asked about the plain old universe prior to the popularity of the multiverse theory.  We can ask: why does the multiverse exist? After all, it is just as modally contingent as 'our' universe, the one we 'see.' Even if there are infinitely many universes in the multiverse, there might not have been any. What then explains  the existence of the multiverse?

If I want to know why 'our' universe exists, it does no good to say that it is one of the universes in the multiverse, for that simply invites the question: why does the multiverse exist?

You might say, "The multiverse contains every possible universe, and therefore, necessarily, it contains ours." This is not a good answer because the ensemble of universes -- the multiverse -- might not have existence at all.  Surely there is a possible world in which nothing physical exists.

Let us also not forget that the multiplicity of universes comes into existence. So there is need of a multiverse-generating  mechanism which will have to operate on some pre-given stuff according to laws of nature. Even if different universes have different laws, there is need for meta-laws to explain how the base-level laws come to be. According to Paul Davies, as paraphrased and quoted here, 

. . .to get a multiverse, you need a universe-generating mechanism, "something that's going to make all those Big Bangs go bang. You're going to need some laws of physics. All theories of the multiverse assume quantum physics to provide the element of spontaneity, to make the bangs happen. They assume pre-existing space and time. They assume the normal notion of causality, a whole host of pre-existing conditions." Davies said there are about "10 different basic assumptions" of physical laws that are required "to get the multiverse theory to work."

Davies then made his deep point. "OK, where did those laws all come from? What about those meta-laws that generate all the universes in the first place? Where did they come from? Then what about the laws or meta-laws that impose diverse local laws upon each individual universe? How do they work? What is the distribution mechanism?" Davies argues that the only thing the multiverse theory does is shift the problem of existence up from the level of one universe to the level of multiple universes. "But you haven't explained it," Davies asserted.

Davies dismissed the idea that "any universe you like is out there somewhere. I think such an idea is just ridiculous and it explains nothing. Having all possible universes is not an explanation, because by invoking everything, you explain nothing."

Here Davies may be going too far. If you want to explain why the physical constants are so finely tuned as to allow the emergence of life and consciousness and the minds of physicists, then it does seem to be a good explanation to say that there are all the possible universes there might have been; it would then be no surprise that in our universe physics exists. It had to exist in at least one! One would not then need God to do the fine-tuning or to actualize a life-supporting universe. But this still leaves unexplained why there is the ensemble of universes in the first place.  

Davies' critique of the multiverse goes deeper. To explain the universe, he rejects "outside explanations," he said.

"I suppose, for me, the main problem [with a multiverse] is that what we're trying to do is explain why the universe is as it is by appealing to something outside of it," Davies told me. "In this case, an infinite number of multiple universes outside of our universe is used as the explanation for our universe." 

Then Davies makes his damning comparison. "To me, multiverse explanations are no better than traditional religion, which appeals to an unseen, unexplained God — a God that is outside of the universe — to explain the universe. In fact, I think both explanations — multiverse and God — are pretty much equivalent." To Davies, this equivalence is not a compliment. 

I don't see the damnation nor the equivalency. The appeal to God is the appeal to a necessary being about which it make no sense to ask: But why does it exist?  The crucial difference between appealing to God and appealing to the multiverse is that the former is a necessary being while the second is not.

I grant, though, that the idea of a necessary being is a very difficult one! 

What Alfie's All About

Read it. 

The title is a play on the title of a great Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition here sung by Dionne Warwick.

Is Leftist Politics Anti-Identity Politics?

S. J. writes,

Reading your posts lately, the following thought struck me. I wonder if it's struck you, and if you'd agree:

Identity politics is a misleading name for the recent catastrophic turn in so-called progressive politics. For what it actually aims at primarily is the *destruction* of traditional modes of identity, which are, loosely speaking, summarised by the slogan "faith, flag and family". What it replaces those with is of secondary importance to that central mission.

That's why the obvious contradictions, and vicious internecine rivalries, on the left seem not (with certain honourable exceptions) to lead to anything approaching the self-doubt and ideological re-evaluation that conservatives assume - logically from their own frame of reference - that they ought. For it simply doesn't matter to the contemporary leftist that his preferred categories are flimsy and self-contradictory. They're only a means to an end; a solvent to be applied to the older forms of identity and self-understanding.

On which account, it would be far more truthful to reckon it "anti-identity politics".

(I might also add that we should therefore avoid the trap of playing up too much the individualism that, rightly understood, is central to much conservative thought, to the point of downplaying those old and authentic attachments - and so allowing the left to pose, utterly falsely, as the champions of community and relational life.)

With heartfelt thanks for the stimulation to thought, not to say sheer enjoyment, that your blog continues to provide.

 

My kind reader is suggesting that left-wing politics is destructive of traditional forms of identity and therefore best understood as anti-identity politics rather than as identity politics.  

 

I see matters differently. There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right.  This became obvious to me  when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.' See If I'm a Racist, then You're a Tribalist!  (56 good comments).

 

As I see it, there is nothing inherently leftist or rightist about identity politics in the way political correctness is inherently leftist. (Anyone who is politically correct is by definition a leftist.)  So what is it to be identity-political? I suggest that it is to take one's primary self-identification to be a tribal identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.

 

In a separate post I hope to clarify and develop this suggestion. 

 

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Is William Kilpatrick Too Soft on Pope Francis?

Dr. Vito Caiati writes,

I read your post on “The Church and Islam: Dangerous Illusions,” and while I share your appreciation of Kilpatrick’s continuing commentary on the real nature of Islam, I am uncomfortable with his statement that “It seems clear to me that the pope and others in the hierarchy are enabling the spread of an evil ideology; however, it’s not at all clear that they understand what they’re doing. Francis, for instance, seems to sincerely believe that all religions are roughly equal in goodness. Thus for him, the spread of any religion must seem like a good thing. It’s an exceedingly naïve view, but one that seems honestly held.”

I do not claim that the Pope is a “collaborator,” but I think that Kilpatrick overlooks the deep anti-Western politics and ideology of Bergoglio, who has expressed open contempt for the advanced capitalist nations to exercise their sovereign rights to control illegal immigration (all his asinine remarks on “walls, the obligation to admit endless streams of “migrants,” and so on);  who offered only a highly muted response to the wholesale murder and displacement of Christians in the Middle East by Islamic fanatics (remember the plane full of refugees that he took back to Italy with him: All Muslims?); and who works tirelessly to undermine Roman Catholic doctrine and traditions, which remain fundamental to many Catholics in Eastern and Southern Europe and in the United States and which constitute an important part of the cultural inheritance of Europe.  His embrace of Islam is part of the leftist embrace of this highly dangerous and alien religious-political ideology under the banners of  diversity and globalism. His perspective on Islam is thus not so “naïve” as Kilpatrick would have us believe. Kilpatrick, like so many Catholics, seems fearful of going the full distance and exposing the Pope and most of the hierarchy of the Church as active participants in the ongoing leftist assault on the nation state and Western civilization.

I fear Dr. Caiati is correct.

On Opposing a Dangerous Ideology that is also a Religion

This article by William Kilpatrick bears on my ongoing conversation with a Canadian philosopher about Islam, religious tests, and constitutional interpretation. Last exchange here.  I'll pull a few quotations from Professor Kilpatrick and add some comments.

The idea of opposing dangerous ideologies is not foreign to Americans, but the idea of opposing an ideology that is also a religion is more problematic. It has become increasingly problematic now that we live in an era in which merely disagreeing with another’s opinions is tantamount to a hate crime.

But obviously, to dissent from a proposition is not to hate a person.  Nor is dissent on the part of the dissenter a sign of mental malfunction. Liberals who would smear Kilpatrick by calling him an 'Islamophobe' are either ignorant or vicious. Ignorant, if they do not understand that a phobia is an irrational fear. Vicious, if they mean to silence such a truth-teller by questioning his sanity.

The U.S. Constitution in the first and second clauses of its First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion. But does Islam fall under this protection? Ought there be freedom of religion for a religion that seeks to eliminate every other religion? Obviously not. The Constitition is not a suicide pact. I argue this out in painful detail in my last exchange with the Canadian.

I don't deny that Islam is a religion. It may even be a way to God for some who know of no better Way. (The allusion is to via, veritas, vita.)But Islam is just as much, if not more, a political ideology that seeks to subvert the principles and values of the American founding. Let us note en passant that this explains what would otherwise be very hard to explain, namely, why the Left is in cahoots with Islam. For the Left too is out to subvert said principles and values. Islamists must view leftists as useful idiots who will be sent packing to the realm of the black-eyed virgins should the former gain the (knife-wielding) upper hand. Leftists are in for a surprise if they think that they can use Islamists for leftist purposes.

I feel a rant coming on, so back to the sober Irishman:

Under Pope Benedict XVI there were signs—such as his Regensburg Address—that the Church was developing a more realistic view of Islam. But whatever ground was gained by Benedict was given up by Francis. Indeed, it seems fair to say that under Francis, the Church’s understanding of Islam regressed. Perhaps the most glaring example of this regression can be found in the Pope’s assertion that “authentic Islam and a proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” It’s hard to imagine any of his predecessors or any of their advisors making a similar claim.

Holy moly! Could Bergoglio the Boneheaded be that benighted?  Yes, take a gander at this:

By contrast, Church leaders and Pope Francis in particular, have become, in effect, enablers of Islam. Pope Francis has denied that Islam sanctions violence, has drawn a moral equivalence between Islam and Catholicism (“If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence”), and has campaigned for the admittance of millions of Muslim migrants into Europe. Moreover, he has criticized those who oppose his open borders policy as hard-hearted xenophobes. In return for his efforts, he has been publicly thanked by several Muslim leaders for his “defense of Islam.”

One might be tempted to use the word “collaborator” instead of “enabler.” But collaborator is too strong a word. In its World War II context, it implies a knowing consent to and cooperation with an evil enterprise. It seems clear to me that the pope and others in the hierarchy are enabling the spread of an evil ideology; however, it’s not at all clear that they understand what they’re doing. Francis, for instance, seems to sincerely believe that all religions are roughly equal in goodness. Thus for him, the spread of any religion must seem like a good thing. It’s an exceedingly naïve view, but one that seems honestly held.

Related: Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity

Tribalism and Diversity

Tribalism is on the rise. Given this fact, does it make sense to admit into one's country ever more different tribes? A piety oft-intoned by leftists is that diversity is our strength. An Orwellianism, that, if tribal diversity is at issue.  For that would amount to the absurdity that the more domestic strife, the stronger we become. It is plain, after all, that tribes do not like each other, and do not see themselves in the other. Tribal identification is other-exclusive.

I am against tribal identification. I realize, however, that I am sawing against the grain of the crooked timber of humanity. So the realist in me says that immigration policy must favor those who are assimilable to our values and principles and must exclude those who aren't.

Now isn't that the sanest thing you've heard all day?

It is, an sich, eminently sane, but not to the destructive and self-enstupidated. 

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Revolution and Worse to Come

From the pen of an astute historian:

Insidiously and incrementally, we are in the process of normalizing violence against the elected president of the United States. If all this fails to delegitimize Trump, fails to destroy his health, or fails to lead to a 2018 midterm Democratic sweep and subsequent impeachment, expect even greater threats of violence. The Resistance and rabid anti-Trumpers have lost confidence in the constitutional framework of elections, and they’ve flouted the tradition by which the opposition allows the in-power party to present its case to the court of public opinion.

[. . .]

We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.

 

Survivalism

Many survivalists are extremists. But extremism is everywhere, in the longevity fanatic, the muscular hypertrophy nut, and so on.

That being said, a  wise man, while hoping  for the best,  prepares for the worst.  But the prepping is kept within reason, where part of being reasonable is maintaining a balanced perspective.  A balanced approach, for me, does not extend to the homemade rain barrels that some recommend.  But I do keep a lot of bottled water and other non-alcoholic potables on hand.  Here are some questions you should ask yourself.

1. Are you prepared to repel a home invasion meeting deadly force with deadly force? Are you prepared for a break down in civil order? 
2. Do you have sufficient food and water to keep you and your family alive for say three weeks?
3. Do you have the battery-operated devices you will need to survive the collapse of the power grid, and enough fresh batteries?
4. Can you put out a fire on your own? 
5. Do you have a sufficient supply of the medications you will need should there be no access to pharmacies?

These are just some of the questions to consider.  But how far will you go with these preparations?  Will you sacrifice the certain present preparing for a disastrous future that may not materialize?  Wouldn't that be foolish?  Wouldn't it be as foolish as the ostrich-like refusal to consider questions like the above?

And then there is the question of suicide, which you ought to confront head on. Do you want to live in the state of nature after the collapse of civil society?  Under what conditions is life worth living?  Civilization is thin ice, a crust easy  to break through, beneath which is  a hell of misery.  (Yes, I know I'm mixing my metaphors.)  When the going gets unbearable, could you see your way clear to providing your spouse with the means of suicide and then killing yourself?  Are there good moral objections to such a course of action? 

Think about these things now while you have time and enjoy peace of mind.

Is an EMP Attack a Threat to be Taken Seriously?

Obama and his administration did not think so. Trump has different and better ideas. Score another for Trump. Please watch the video. You will learn something from an expert.

Filed under: Survival

Frege's Horse Paradox, Bradley's Regress, and the Problem of Predication

The concept horse is not a concept.  Thus spoke Frege, paradoxically.  Why does he say such a thing?  Because the subject expression 'the concept horse' refers to an object.  It names an object.  Concepts and objects on his scheme are mutually exclusive. No concept is an object and conversely.   Only objects can be named.  No concept can be named. Predicates are not names.  If you try to name a concept you will fail.  You will succeed only in naming an object.  You will not succeed in expressing the predicativity of the concept.  Concepts are predicable while objects are not. It is clear that one cannot predicate Socrates of Socrates. We can, however, predicate wisdom of Socrates.  It is just that wisdom is not an object.

But now we are smack in the middle of the paradox. For to explain Frege's view I need to be able to talk about the referent of the gappy predicate ' ___ is wise.'  I need to be able to say that it is a predicable entity, a concept.  But how can I do this without naming it, and thus objectifying it?  Ineffability may be the wages of Frege's absolute object-concept distinction.

To savor the full flavor of the paradox, note that the sentence 'No concept can be named'  contains the general name 'concept.'  It seems we, or rather the Fregeans, cannot say what we or they mean.  But if we cannot say what we mean, how do we know that we mean anything at all?  Is an inexpressible meaning a meaning?  Are there things that cannot be said but only shown? (Wittgenstein) Perhaps we cannot say that concepts are concepts; all we can do is show that they are by employing open sentences or predicates such as '___ is tall.'  Unfortunately, this is also paradoxical.  For I had to say what the gappy predicate shows. I had to say that concepts are concepts and that concepts are what gappy predicates (predicates that are not construed as names) express.

Why can't concepts be named?  Why aren't they a kind of higher-order object? Why can't they be picked out using abstract substantives?  Why can't we say that, in a sentence such as 'Tom is sad,' 'Tom' names an object while 'sad' names a different sort of object, a concept/property?  Frege's thought seems to be that if concepts are objects, then they cannot exercise their predicative function.  Concepts are essentially and irreducibly predicative, and if you objectify them -- think or speak of them as objects -- then you destroy their predicative function. A predicative proposition is not a juxtaposition of two objects.  If  there is Tom and there is sadness, it doesn't follow that sadness is true of Tom. What makes a property true of its subject?  An obvious equivalence: if F-ness is true of a, then *a is F* is true.  So we might ask the questions this way: What makes *a is F* true?

The Problem of the Unity of the Proposition and the Fregean Solution

We are brought back to the problem of the unity of the proposition. It's as old as Plato. It is a genuine problem, but no one has ever solved it. (Of course, I am using 'solve' as a verb of success.)

A collection of two objects is not a proposition.  The mereological sum Tom + sadness is neither true nor false; propositions are either true or false.  The unity of a proposition is a type of unity that attracts a truth value, whereas the unity of a sum does not attract a truth value.  The unity of a proposition is mighty puzzling even in the simplest cases.   It does no good to say that the copula 'is' in 'Tom is sad' refers to the instantiation relation R and that this relation connects the concept/property to the object, sadness to Tom, and in such a way as to make sadness true of Tom.  For then you sire Mr Bradley's relation regress.  It's infinite and it's vicious.  Note that if the sum Tom + sadness can exist without it being true that Tom is sad, then the sum Tom + R + sadness can also exist without it being true that Tom is sad. 

Enter Frege with his obscure talk of the unsaturatedness of concepts. Concepts exist whether or not they are instantiated, but they are  'gappy':  if a first-level concept is instantiated by an object, there is no need for a tertium quid to connect concept and object. They fit together like plug and socket, where the plug is the object and the concept the socket.  The female receptacle accepts the male plug without the need of anything to hold the two together.

On this approach no regress arises.  For if there is no third thing that holds concept and object together, then no worries can arise as to how the third thing is related to the concept on the one side and the object on the other.  But our problem about the unity of the proposition remains unsolved.  For if the concept can exist uninstantiated, then both object and concept, Tom and sadness, can exist without it being true that Tom is sad. 

The dialectic continues on and on. Philosophia longa, vita brevis. Life is brief; blog posts ought to be.

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The Constitution, Reason, and Abstract Principles

This entry continues the 'religious test' discussion. (Last installment here.) The Canadian writes,

I agree that there's no incoherence in a statement such as "(1) The Constitution guarantees  freedom of religion and disallows religious tests.  (2) The Constitution guarantees these things subject to the proviso that the religion in question is compatible with the principles of the American founding."  But why is the most reasonable interpretation one that projects such a proviso on to the text?  What are the criteria for a reasonable interpretation?  On the one hand, a reasonable interpretation might be one that results in a constitution that reasonable people could accept.  Naturally, if this is the criterion, no reasonable interpretation can produce a constitution that, in practice, would create a society where that same constitution would be destroyed.  On the other hand, it might simply be one that's adequately supported by the textual evidence (and other evidence, e.g., reasonably hypotheses about the authors' intentions).  Or maybe a reasonable interpretation is subject to both constraints.  In any case there is a tension between the two.  As you say, there's really no good textual evidence (or any other kind, as far as I know) to indicate that the Constitution really does implicitly limit the scope of religious freedom so as to preclude the freedom to practice traditional Islam, or that it limits the scope of 'No religious test' so as to allow for tests with respect to Islam.  I'd argue that a reasonable interpretation in the second sense--the most reasonable one, in that sense--is unreasonable in the first sense.  

"What are the criteria for a reasonable interpretation?" I agree that there is no evading this difficult question. One answer is that a reasonable interpretation is an internally coherent one.  The First Amendment guarantees the "free exercise" of religion and "freedom of speech," inter alia. Now if "no religious test" (Article VI, section III) is interpreted in so latitudinarian a fashion as to allow Sharia-supporting Muslims to gain political power, then we are on the road to an internal contradiction.  For these Muslims, once in power,  will of course try to shut down the free exercise of religions other than Islam, and they will attempt to prohibit freedom of speech if it involves any criticism, no matter how respectful, of Muhammad or of any aspect of their religion. They will have used the Constitution to destroy the Constitution.  They will have exploited our freedom of religion to eliminate freedom of religion, and our freedom of speech to eliminate freedom of speech.

It seems to me that the Constitution cannot be interpreted so as to allow the emergence of the following logical contradiction:

a) Under no circumstances shall (i) the freedom to practice the religion of one's choice (or to refrain from the practice of any religion) be prohibited by the government, or (ii) the freedom to express one's view publicly be abridged.

b) Under some circumstances (e.g., when enough Muslim fundamentalists gain power) the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech many be prohibited and abridged.

Note that the (a)-(b) dyad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot both be true.  What we have here is a strict logical contradiction.

But to embrace a logical contradiction is the height of unreasonableness. 

I conclude that to interpret the Constitution in such a way that it allows for the emergence of the above contradiction is unreasonable. The solution is obvious to me: one cannot allow a destructive political ideology such as Islam to count as a religion for purposes of Constitutional interpretation.  I am conceding that Islam is a religion and not a mere political ideology masquerading as a religion, and I am conceding that it is a religion in its own right and not a Christian heresy; the point is that it is a religion-cum-political ideology that is incompatible with the principles and values of the American founding.

Therefore, Islam ought not count as a religion when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. It may well be a way to God for those brought up on it and who know no better way, and it deserves respect for that reason. But this is no reason to abstract from its totalitarian and theocratic political nature, a nature at war with our political principles.

The Canadian continues:

In any case, I think that for your argument you need the first notion of reasonable interpretation.  But then there's a problem:  Leftists, whose ideas about reasonable political principles are very different from ours, can now argue on a similar basis that we should just ignore the seemingly plain meaning of the Constitution in cases where it conflicts with their values.  For instance, they can argue that since it's just not reasonable to let citizens buy AR-15s, the 2nd Amendment must be interpreted in such a way that citizens don't have that right.  That seems worrisome.  If there isn't even a generally agreed meaning for the constitution, the only way to politically resolve such disagreements is by some kind of debate over ultimate aims or values; but I know you agree with me that that isn't likely to happen either.  So it seems wise to insist that the constitution's meaning is the meaning of the text, not the meaning that we think it would have or should have in order to be most reasonable.  But then we're back to the problem that the text just doesn't seem to exclude Islamic freedom of religion, or to allow for a "religious test" in that case--or even to exclude the possibility that the Constitution is just internally inconsistent in some respects...  

In many cases there is no "plain meaning."  The meaning has to be 'excavated.' Does "establishment of religion" have a plain meaning in the First Amendment? (That's a rhetorical question.) "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."  The meaning is open to interpretation.  Or take the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Does 2A bear its meaning on its sleeve? Of course not. What is the Militia? Is the right individual or collective? Does the initial clause supply a reason, or the only reason, in justification of the right to keep and bear arms? I have argued elsewhere that it supplies a reason, not the only reason. I am sure many if not most would disagree.

So I deny the Canadian's assumption that the Constitution has a plain meaning that can just be 'read off' the text. There is no avoiding interpretation in the light of principles that are not themselves articulated in the Constitution. The Law of Non-Contradiction, for example, is not stated in the Constitution. We bring that principle to the text, and reasonably so.  

Or consider the Principle of Charity in interpretation. To save keystrokes I won't formulate the principle.  My astute readers know more or less what it is. Well, does "All men are created equal" in the Declaration have a plain meaning?  There are benighted souls who think it implies the empirical equality of all human beings.  But this violates the Principle of Charity since if the declaration in the Declaration were so interpreted it would come out false! The Charity principle, however, is not to be found in any of the founding documents; we bring it to the text and we do so reasonably.

There is no avoiding interpretation. The text does not have a plain meaning. The other extreme, however, is far worse. There are those who say that the Constitution means whatever SCOTUS says it means.  But then there is no text; there is a tabula rasa upon which people in black robes write whatever they want.  The most SCOTUS can do is decide upon an enforceable meaning among candidate possibilities that find support in the text.  That alone is the reasonable view.

For example, are 2A rights collective or individual? It was decided that they are individual. SCOTUS in this decision came to the 'right' decision. Yes, my use of 'right' is tendentious. More on this problem below.

What I am saying, then, is that there is a text, not a tabula rasa; the text has a meaning; the meaning is not obvious; the meaning is subject to interpretation in the light of principles brought to the text.

But whose principles are these?  Those of a reasonable person. But what constitutes reasonableness? Here is where the crunch comes, as my Canadian interlocutor fully appreciates.  SCOTUS has the power to lay down the law and enforce an interpretation of the Constitution.  But who has the power to decide what the principles of rationality are? Logically prior question: Are the principles of rationality matters of decision at all?

The Canadian concludes:

We might be back to a recurring deeper disagreement here.  I don't think that any system of abstract principles and values is enough to provide a framework for a workable society.  I think some kind of pre-rational or pre-conceptual horizon of meaning and practice and natural community is the basis; explicit principles and values have a role, but only when they're understood by everyone to operate within that specific cultural world.  The principles of "no religious test" or "freedom of religion" were just fine when they were only being applied to a fairly small range of fairly similar religions, practiced by relatively similar people.  (And, sure, there were always some who were not so similar--Africans, Amerindians--but they were small in number and had no real influence.)  Once every religion on earth was included in American society, that was bound to create insoluble problems.  Of course, one option is to simply say that there will be freedom of religion for a specific list of religions, and only those ones.  But that seems contrary to other traditional American principles.  I suspect that the very idea of "religion" that we in the west tend to take for granted is really an artefact of our specific religious and cultural heritage.  There is probably no useful general account of "religion" across all human cultures.  So it would be unwise to propose any kind of freedom for  that kind of thing. 

I agree that abstract principles and values are not enough. They have to reflect a (temporally) prior pre-conceptual shared understanding that is taken for granted. The principles and values cannot be imposed ab extra, but must be a sort of distillate or articulation on the conceptual plane of what is already tacitly understood and accepted at the pre-conceptual level.  Otherwise we will argue about the principles.

Argument about first principles is the province of philosophy and is legitimate there. In philosophy, nothing is immune to scrutiny. I should think that 'nothing immune to scrutiny'  is a constitutive rule of the philosophical 'game' or enterprise.  But if our politics becomes a philosophical free-for-all, then we are in trouble. 

There is no place for dogmas in philosophy. But in politics and religion we seem to need them. We need propositions that are unquestionably accepted.

For example, if we don't all accept that there is a  sense in which we are all equal, equal as rights-possessors, then we are in deep trouble. And if we don't all accept that certain ideologies such as Islam are incompatible with the principles enshrined in the U. S. Constitution, then we are in deep trouble.  Examples are easily multiplied.

I think we agree on why we are in the mess we are in. As you put it, "Once every religion on earth was included in American society, that was bound to create insoluble problems."   But benign non-Christian religions such as Buddhism are not the problem. The problem is Islam.  The solution is extreme vetting of immigrants from Muslim countries.  "Of course, one option is to simply say that there will be freedom of religion for a specific list of religions, and only those ones.  But that seems contrary to other traditional American principles."

I disagree. Which traditional American principle are you referring to?  Don't tell me "freedom of religion." Islam is not a religion in a sense that could allow it to be on a list of acceptable religions given American principles.

Can a multi-cultural society flourish?  There is reason to be skeptical. A society cannot flourish without shared principles and values. But the latter presuppose and grow out of a shared public culture.  Acquiescence in and assimilation to that shared culture -- Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian -- must be demanded of all would-be immigrants.  Otherwise we will break apart and become easy pickings for foreign aggressors.

I suspect it is already too late to turn things around peacefully. Civil war is a real possibility.

Black Privilege

“The story at Starbucks isn’t racism but entitlement. The two men felt entitled to loiter on private property without buying anything. They decided that the rules didn’t apply to them. And apparently they were correct.” —Matt Walsh

I love hanging out in coffee houses, reading, talking, and most of all, playing chess. I fancy myself a strong coffee house player, which means that I'm a patzer, but I'll clean your clock if you learned the game from your uncle. (Full disclosure: I'm in the B category; highest USCF rating = 1720. I beat Reppert once in a coffee house (on the White side of a Smith-Morra gambit) and two or three experts (2000-2200) at tournaments.)

I consider myself entitled to take up space only if I have purchased something.

Being black is not carte blanche for bad behavior. 

Michael J. Totten on Cuba

Excerpt:

As Christopher Hitchens once said of North Korea, communist states are places where everything that isn’t absolutely compulsory is absolutely forbidden. Mounting any kind of resistance against them is nearly impossible unless and until the state loses its will to continue. Don’t be deceived by Havana’s crumbling beauty, its upbeat music and people, its enviable location in the Caribbean. “The surveillance and denunciation system is so rigorous,” French historian Pascal Fontaine wrote in The Black Book of Communism, “that family intimacy is almost nonexistent.” “Cuba looks exactly like its photos,” M.J. Porter wrote in the Introduction to Havana Real by Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez in 2011, “and yet if feels different. I fell in love with Cuba and Cubans. Something felt like home. Completely unforeseen, however, was the weight of the totalitarian state.”

Surveillance-cum-denunciation. Don't say it can't happen here. It is happening here.  

And you are still a Democrat?

Related: Mona Charen on the Left-Leaning Pope Francis

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 40 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 40 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 294th birthday. Sapere aude!

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

Earth Day 2018

Maverick Philosopher loves Earth with an ordinate love but doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day.  Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking.  So he refers you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.  A rich and subtle essay.  Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same)  point with aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of  Earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

One recalls the case of Timothy Treadwell  who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. This piece from Outside magazine tells the grisly tale. 

In the Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal."

There are here the unmistakeable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or some other 'icon.'

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ambulo Ergo Sum

Dionne Warwick, Walk On By

Leroy Van Dyke, Walk On By.  Same title, different song.

Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight

Gus Cannon, Walk Right In, 1929.  Is that a kazoo I hear? Rooftop Singers' 1962 version.

Rufus Thomas, Walking the Dog, 1965

Ventures, Walk Don't Run. The boys are aging nicely.  A big hit back in 1960.

Everly Brothers, Walk Right Back

Four Seasons, Walk Like a Man. Sing like a castrato.  Walk or wop?

Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line

Ronnettes, Walkin' in the Rain

Left Banke, Walk Away Renee

Robert Johnson, Walkin' Blues.  

Jimmy Rogers, Walkin' By Myself.  Butterfield and Bloomfield with the latter's solo at 3:42 ff.

UPDATE (4/23)

James Soriano sends this:

You may have seen this, but there is sonic evidence of the voice of a  late 19th century castrato on YouTube.  Alessandro Moreschi (1858 –1922) sings the Bach/Gounod "Ave Maria" in a 1904 recording.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjvfqnD0ws

 

Whatever the circumstances of his castration, Moreschi was the soprano at St. John Lateran by the time he was 13 years old.  

 

Seven Forces Driving America Toward Civil War

No one in his right mind could wish for civil war. At the moment it is unlikely, but it is becoming more likely each day as the nation sinks into madness, 'thanks' almost exclusively to the ever-expanding extremism of the hard Left which has captured the Democrat Party. 

John Hawkins lists seven 'forces' pushing us in the direction of armed civil conflict: disrespect for the Constitution; tribalism; the ever-expanding power of the Federal government; moral decline; the national debt; lack of a shared culture; mindless gun-grabbing.

We certainly do live in interesting times! Who can be bored?

Kurt Schlichter Lays into Never Trumpers

Cum ira et studio.

A take-off on a line from Tacitus, sine ira et studio, "without anger and partiality."  There is a place for righteous anger as there is for partiality and polemic. Schlichter's rant ends thusly:

You’ve talked and talked and talked about principles, but as James Comey and Robert Mueller and your gal Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit undermined every principle this country was founded on, all you did was clutch pearls about how Trump is icky. This country is in real danger of breaking apart, of actual conflict, but all you can think of is recovering your cheesy little seat on the Beltway bench.

No one’s fooled. And no one cares. Which ought to scare the hell out of you. Because when the liberals figure out that you have zero credibility with us real conservatives, you’ll stop being their useful idiot. You’ll just be a plain old idiot.

Still and all, I retain a soft spot in my heart for Never Trumper Mona Charen.

David Horowitz on Black Reparations

Here:

Horowitz destroys the argument for reparations, and in a second chapter, he challenges the victimization logic that offers white racism as the excuse for any "underperformance" by the black community.  There is no one alive today who held any slaves or personally was a slave.  Many black Americans in the country today have no ancestors in America who were slaves.  A majority of Americans are descended from people who came to the United States after the Civil War and bear no guilt for the ugly practice in one region of the United States two centuries ago.  Those who are descended from people who lived in the states that did not join the Confederacy have 400,000 dead Union soldiers, plus many hundreds of thousands injured, as their sacrifice to liberating the slaves and preserving the Union.  Reparations for Japanese-Americans in the United States or Holocaust survivors in Europe were paid to people who had themselves lived through specific horrors or criminal behavior by governments.  Must all Americans today pay for something that ended over 150 years ago and for which a bloody war was fought?  Are all African-Americans equally entitled to compensation for something that impacted some of their ancestors seven generations back?

The victimization theme – that white racism is solely responsible for the economic situation of black Americans, their higher crime rates and poor academic performance, eliminates any agency for individuals to beat the odds or take advantage of the increased opportunities that are now available, including trillions spent on social welfare programs over the past half-century, much of that designed to address the needs of African-Americans.  These programs include affirmative action admissions to universities and similar approaches to hiring by corporations and other firms.  Martin Luther King was aware that racism and discrimination were present in 1960s America, as was segregation in large parts of the country, but he believed that these should not be an excuse for black American behavior that only worsened their plight.  Charlatans and race-hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have dominated the civil rights movement since King's death, always pushing the white racism bogeyman, while those more in line with King's legacy, including Jason Riley, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and Glen Loury, are ignored or condemned as sell-outs.  Arguing that cultural norms within a community can be damaging to the success of future generations is simply a forbidden theme – witness the recent campaign against University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax.

Why Do Physicists Write Popular Garbage?

To make money, and because writing bad philosophy is easy while doing good physics is hard.

Latest example to come to my attention. It appears in that noted philosophy journal, Financial Times.

I've had it with refuting this crap.  I used to think it was worth doing, but no longer.  It is like evaluating a bad student paper. Where does one start?

From Bad to Worse

His johnson became his dousing rod, but it led him not to the waters of life, but to the fleshpots. This after abandoning organized religion and its hypocrisies, but also its curbs and checks on destructive behavior. So he went from bad to worse. He started on down that Lost Highway.

Eminent Domain Abuse

Little Pink House, a movie.

The right to private property is another thing leftists don't understand, unless it is their private property. 

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:

The Revolution is good.  But why?  One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create.  The abolition of property is not an end.  It is a means.

This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about.  I include among private property the means for the defense of life, liberty, and property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.  

CUNY Law’s Disgrace

Social-justice warriors shout down a campus speaker delivering a talk on free speech, and school officials embrace them.

Could a Theist Maintain that Some Lack a Religious Disposition?

Suppose you believe that man has been created in the image and likeness of God.  Could you, consistently with that belief, hold that only some possess a religious disposition?

I have discussed this before, but the question came up again in an e-mail from a reader.

I often say things like the following:

The religious person perceives our present  life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory and unameliorable by unaided human effort whether individual or collective; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale of tears that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place but is instead a place of probation and a vale of soul-making; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness.  He feels his fellows to be fools endlessly distracted by bagatelles, sunken deep in Pascalian divertissement, as Platonic troglodytes unaware of the Cave as Cave.

I maintain that one in whom the above doesn't strike a chord, or sound a plaintive arpeggio, is one who lacks a religious disposition.  In some the disposition is simply lacking, and it cannot be helped.  I 'write them off' no matter how analytically sharp they are.   One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them, any more than one can share one's delight in poetry with the terminally prosaic, or one's pleasure in mathematics with the mathematically anxious.  For those who lack the disposition, religion is not what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one. It can only be something strained and ridiculous, a tissue of fairy tales, something for children and old ladies, an opiate for the weak and dispossessed, a miserable anthropomorphic projection, albeit unconscious, a wish-fulfillment, something cooked up in the musty medieval cellars of priest-craft where unscrupulous manipulators exploit human gullibility for their own advantage.

A perceptive interlocutor raises an objection that I would put as follows. 

You say that some lack a religious disposition.  I take it you mean that they are utterly bereft of it.  But how is that consistent with the imago dei?  For if we are made in the divine image, then we are spiritual beings who must, as spiritual beings, possess at least the potentiality of communion with the divine source of the spirit within us, even if this potentiality is to no degree actual.  After all, we are not in the image of God as animals, but as spiritual beings, and part of being a spiritual being is having the potentiality to know itself, and thus to know that one is a creature if in fact one is a creature, and in knowing this to know God in some measure.

How might I meet this objection? 

One way is by denying that all biologically human beings bear the divine image, or bear the divine image in its fullness.  Maybe it is like this.  The existence of specimens of the zoological species to which we belong is accounted for by the theory of evolution.  God creates the physical universe in which evolution occurs, and in which human animals evolve from lower forms.  The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis is not an account of how human animals came to be that is in competition with the theory of evolution.  It is not about human animals at all.

Adam is not the first man; there was no first man.  Eve is not the first woman; there was no first woman.  Adam and Eve are not the first human animals; they are the first human animals that, without ceasing to be animals, became spiritual beings when God bestowed upon them personhood, which involves self-consciousness, free will, and moral sense, but also the sense of the divine and a call to a higher life.  But the free divine bestowal was not the same for all: from some he withheld the sensus divinitatis and with it the power to know God and become godlike.

I know that this is not theologically orthodox.  But it fits with my experience.  I have always felt that some human beings lack depth or spirit or soul or inwardness or interiority or whatever you want to call it.  It is not that I think of them as zombies as philosophers use this term: I grant that they are conscious and self-conscious.  But I sense that there is nothing to them beyond that.  There is no sense of the Higher. They sense no call to the task of self-individuation.  There is no depth-dimension: they are surface all the way down. They are bereft of spirit. They may have moral sense, but it doesn't point them beyond this life. They may have conscience but it is only a product of acculturation and not a source of spiritual insight. They are human biologically but not normatively: there is a sense in which, ringing a change on Nietzsche, the death of God is by the same stroke the death of man: he suffers demotion and is after God's death back among the animals and in series with them, just the cleverest of the land mammals.

So the first conjecture is that not all human animals, even if biologically normal, are spiritual beings.

But it may be that a better line for me is the simpler one of saying that in all there is the religious disposition, but in some it is  undeveloped or unmanifested, rather than saying that in some it is not present at all. (A disposition need not be manifested to exist; glass is disposed to shatter if suitably struck, but a particular piece of glass needn't shatter to possess (actually not potentially!) the disposition to shatter.)

The "perceptive interlocutor" (Steven Nemes) mentioned above responds (and these are his actual words):

To suppose that some persons lack the religious disposition is certainly not theologically kosher, at least not from the Christian perspective. This is more akin to certain varieties of predestinarian gnosticism to which early Christian theologians (e.g., Origen, Irenaeus, et al.) vehemently objected. These gnostic theories proposed that there were various different classes of human persons, some of whom were structurally determined to realize saving knowledge (gnosis) of Reality whereas others were cruder, baser, and doomed to live unenlightened lives in the body. The difference between classes was not choices they had made or anything of the sort; it was simply their ontological structure to reach enlightenment or not. The early Christians objected to this in two ways: first, it is denial of the freedom of the will of the human person, since some evidently are intrinsically incapable of choosing salvation; second, it is incompatible with God's goodness, since if he is good, he desires the salvation of all and works to accomplish it.

 

I don't disagree that these are  among the theologically orthodox responses to my suggestion above.  How good they are, however, is a separate question.  First, if God does not grant to some class of persons the religious disposition, that is not a denial to them of freedom of the will.  They can be as free as you please; they just lack that particular power, the power of achieving salvific knowledge.  I am not free to fly like a bird, but it doesn't follow that I am not free.

 

As for the second point, there may be a confusion of damnation with non-knowledge of God.  The suggestion above is that only some biologically human persons  are disposed to seek God and possibly know God.  That is not to say that these persons are predestined to a state in which they are conscious of God's existence but cut off from God.

 

God desires the ultimate beatitude of all that have the power to achieve it -- but not all have this power on the above suggestion.  If God desires the ultimate beatitude of all whether or not they have the power to know God, then God desires the ultimate beatitude of dolphins and apes and cats and dogs.

I suppose these are the two greatest problems for the quasi-gnostic position you consider above. Another problem would be that it might ethically justify mistreatment and prejudice against persons deemed to lack a religious disposition. After all, if they cannot sense God's existence and enjoy communion with him, how are they any different from animals? If God himself didn't care to make them such that they could know him, why should theists and those having the religious disposition care for them any more than for a dog?

I don't see any problem here either.  Not all human beings have the same powers, but people like me and my interlocutor would not dream of using this fact to justify mistreatment of  certain classes of people.  (Analogy: I don't believe that animals have rights, but I don't need to assign rights to them to have good reason to treat them humanely

 

Interim Conclusion

 

Many if not most people in the West these days fail to manifest a genuine religious disposition.  (Going along to get along by attending services etc. does not attest a genuine disposition.) While it does not follow that they lack such a disposition, absence of manifestation is defeasible evidence of the disposition's nonexistence.  Supposing there is no religious disposition in some, the theist can, consistently with his theism, explain the fact in the unorthodox 'Gnostic' way sketched above.

 

Or the theist can insist that the disposition is present in all, but in some so buried under the detritus of sin and social suggestions as to be indiscernible by the person himself or others.

 

On the other hand, if one is a metaphysical naturalist, the problem dissolves: there is no God and the religious disposition is an evolutionary quirk in some that bespeaks nothing.

Zuck

Here:

So here’s what I know about Mark Zuckerberg. During those first few weeks of Facebook’s existence, while he was assuring his fellow college students that we could trust him with their identities, he had a private conversation on instant messenger with a friend. That conversation was subsequently leaked, and published by Silicon Valley Insider. It is as follows:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submitted it

ZUCK: i don’t know why

ZUCK: they “trust me”

ZUCK: dumb fucks

In the intervening years, I’ve learned that Zuckerberg values his own privacy so much that he has security guards watching his trash, that he bought four houses surrounding his own house to avoid having neighbors, that he sued hundreds of Hawaiians to sever their claim to tiny plots of land within his massive Kauai estate, and that he secretly built tools to prevent further private messages from coming back to haunt him.

Separation of Leftism and State

Contemporary liberals support separation of church and state, and so do I.  But they have no problem with using the coercive power of the state to impose leftist ideology.  Now leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager (see article below), but it is very much like one, and if you can see what is wrong with allowing contentious theological doctrines to drive  politics, then you ought to be able to see what is wrong with allowing the highly contentious ideological commitments of leftism to drive politics, most of which revolve around the leftist trinity (Prager) of race, gender, and class. 

If "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ," as per the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, then it ought to make no law that establishes the quasi-religion of leftism.

Even more important than separation of church and state these days is separation of leftism and state.

This is a large topic; for today, just one example of what I am getting at.

It is a tenet of contemporary liberalism that opposition to same-sex 'marriage' is 'discriminatory' and that opponents of it are 'bigots.'  Now this is both obtuse and slanderous for reasons we supplied in earlier entries.  But liberals have a right to their opinions, even if it is to be wished that they would give some thought to the corresponding obligation to form correct opinions.  Be that as it may, liberals have a right to their benighted views, and we ought to tolerate them.  After all, we too are liberals in a much older, and a defensible, sense: we believe in toleration, open inquiry, free speech, individual liberty, etc.  And we are liberal and self-critical enough to countenance the possibility that perhaps  we are the benighted ones.

But toleration has limits.

What we ought not tolerate is  the sort of coercion of the individual by the state that we find in the case of the Washington State florist who refused to sell floral arrangements to be used at a same-sex 'marriage' ceremony.  This woman has no animus against gays, and had sold flowers to the homosexual couple.  But she was not about to violate her own conscience by providing flowers for a same-sex event.  As a result she was sued by the Washington State attorney general, and then by the ACLU.

Now do you see what is wrong with that? 

The state says to the individual: 

You have a right to your religious and philosophical beliefs, but only so long as you keep them to yourself and don't allow them to be expressed in your relations with your fellow citizens.  You may believe what you want in the privacy of your own mind, but you may not translate your beliefs into social or political action.  But we are free to translate our leftist 'theology' into rules and regulations that diminish your liberty. 

What then becomes of the "free exercise of religion" spoken of in the First Amendment?  It is out the window.  The totalitarian state has taken one more step in its assault on the liberty of the individual.

The totalitarian state of the contemporary liberal says to the individual: you have no right to live your beliefs unless we allow you to; but we have every right to impose our leftist beliefs on you and force you to live as we see fit.

Here are some home truths that cannot be repeated too often:

We are not the property of the state.

Our rights and liberties do not come from the state, but are logically antecedent to it, inscribed as they are in the very nature of things.

We do not have to justify our keeping of what is ours; the state has to justify its taking.

Related:

Leftism: The World's Most Dynamic Religion?

Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit

I'm pretty good with the invective, but I can't hold a candle to Kurt Schlichter.  Here is another taste:

Yes, the Democrats do have a major advantage in the fact that the Republican establishment, especially in Congress, is largely a gaggle of drooling idiots. From Sissy Sasse to Foamy Marco, these fussy failures seem determined to demoralize the base with their tedious moralizing about how “We are better than that” and “Oh, well I never.” The GOP would have no problem if these dorks had just one tenth the will to win as they do the will to posture for the benefit of a liberal media that hates them and that will disembowel them the moment they stop being useful idiots and become merely idiots.

To say that invective has no place in political discourse would be like saying that shooting has no place in warfare.

Take Hillary. She is a greedy, crooked, slanderous, race-baiting liar. You cannot engage a miserable specimen like this on the plane of reason. You have to punch back with mockery, derision, and invective. And throw in a little contumely for good measure.

You don't think she is a slanderous, race-baiting, liar?  See here:

Hillary Clinton on Thursday slammed the Trump administration for promoting "racist and white supremacist" views while praising her "dear friend" Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) for being one of the leading opposition voices. 

White supremacist? Maxine Waters? Birds of a feather flock together.

You need to tell us what a white supremacist is, Hillary, and define 'racist' while you are at it. Put up or STFU.

Related:

Is Every Racist a White Supremacist?

What is White Supremacy?

Related articles

American Patriot Daily - Hillary Clinton Kept Digging Her Own Grave With This Insane Comment

Hillary Clinton Is Still Stuck in 2016 - And She's Going After Comey Again

If You Like to Think . . .

. . . you'll like my blog.

If you don't like to think, you need my blog.

(Double your money back if not completely satisfied.)

Illinois Exodus

Illinois, like California, is bleeding population.

Whatever King Midas touched turned to gold. Whatever a philosopher touches turns into a puzzle. Whatever a leftist touches turns to crap.

People are voting in a manner most effective: with feet and wallets. Why live in a crap hole?

As you all know by now, people need a crap map to negotiate with safety the feculent hodological spaces of Baghdad by the Bay.

I like my hodology straight with no admixture of scatology.

And you are still a Democrat?

More on "No Religious Test"

A Canadian reader comments and I reply:

I've been thinking about the problem of interpreting "no religious test" in light of your post.  It's actually a very difficult problem!  I'm almost convinced the correct response is that, unfortunately, if the Constitution is interpreted correctly then fundamentalist Muslims do indeed have the right to hold public office--given the most natural and reasonable interpretation of word meanings and even taking into account the likely intentions of the founding fathers, the history of legal interpretation, etc.  It's very hard to get around this.  Maybe rather than saying that the Constitution is not a suicide pact on any sane interpretation, we have to say that a sane person would reject both suicide pacts and some parts of the US Constitution.

I grant that it is a very difficult problem, and I am aware that few will be convinced by what I wrote earlier. Ask anybody what Islam is and he will tell you that it is a religion. And then, given that

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.(Article VI)

it seems to follow via some uncontroversial auxiliary premises that no Muslim shall be barred from running for office simply because he is a Muslim. 

But of course among those Muslims are those who have no intention of assimilating and accepting our values but instead seek to impose Sharia on us thereby rejecting our values and principles and subverting our system of government.

So the question I would put to my fellow citizens is: Are you comfortable with an interpretation of the Constitution that allows for its elimination and the values and principles it enshrines?

I am not.

There are those who will say: let anyone immigrate from anywhere and then let the people who have immigrated decide what they want. They call that democracy, and they are all for it.  The people are the residents within certain geographical borders, and residency constitutes citizenship. If the residents want blasphemy laws, then we shall have blasphemy laws.  

You point out that Islam is not just a religion but also a political ideology.  But does that really help?  It still is a religion, and if the Constitution forbids any "religious test", without ever saying anything about the scope of "religion", the most natural interpretation is that even religions that double as political ideologies--most religions, really--are subject to the "no religious test" rule.  You say that we could declare Islam an inadmissible religion, but then wouldn't effectively mean that the Constitution is self-contradictory?  On the one hand, there is to be freedom of religion and no religious test--the subject here being surely just religion in general.  On the other hand, only some religions are protected by the "no religious test" rule, and for other religions there can be a religious test after all.  That seems incoherent, no?

Islam is a religion, but not a religion in the sense in which Hinduism, Buddhism Judaism, and Christianity are religions. Will you grant me that? Or must I argue it out?  

There is no contradiction or incoherence such as you imagine. I take it you find no incoherence in what the logic books call exceptive propositions. For example, "All citizens of the United States are guaranteed freedom of religion except those whose religions are incompatible with the values and principles of the American founding." The following propositions are logically consistent. (1) The Constitution guarantees  freedom of religion and disallows religious tests.  (2) The Constitution guarantees these things subject to the proviso that the religion in question is compatible with the principles of the American founding.

Now the Constitution does not contain these formulations.  But we will agree that the document is subject to interpretation. My claim is that it is most reasonable interpreted along the lines I have suggested.

As for incoherence, I should think that your account is more justly charged with it. A constitution that allows for its own subversion is incoherent if not strictly self-contradictory in the logical sense.  The provisions of such a constitution do not cohere with its own continued existence.

Actually I don't know that the idea of a church/state or religion/politics distinction will make sense if we allow that some religions are also political ideologies.  If the two can be separated, wouldn't that mean that the religions that are also political must be either banned or else somehow reformulated so that they're only religious?  Otherwise, the effect would be to prevent the normal or traditional practice of those religions--since normally or by their nature they'd function as political entities.  But then wouldn't that be incompatible with the ideal of freedom of religion?  I don't know.  Just some rambling thoughts.  The issue seems very confusing.  The US Constitution was never meant to apply to this bizarre multicultural situation that's been induced.  

But why on earth would you want the normal or traditional practice of (radical) Islam in the U. S. , Canada, France, the West generally?  I know you don't want that.

The Founders figured something out. They figured out that a modicum of civil peace can be had if government is kept limited in scope and kept separate from religion.

Freedom of religion, like freedom of speech, and like toleration, has limits.  As you know, Islam does not recognize freedom of religion. You either convert, accept dhimmitude, or are put to the sword. It is therefore entirely reasonable to place restrictions on freedom of religion and ban politically subversive religions.

A commitment to freedom of religion becomes incoherent and suicidal when it is taken to imply freedom for all religions including those that reject freedom of religion.  Similarly for freedom of speech and toleration. A sane toleration must be intolerant of the intolerant.

Related articles

"No Religious Test"

The Politicization of the FBI

Joseph E. diGenova:

Over the past year, facts have emerged that suggest there was a plot by high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in the Obama administration, acting under color of law, to exonerate Hillary Clinton of federal crimes and then, if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump and his campaign for colluding with Russia to steal the presidency. This conduct was not based on mere bias, as has been widely claimed, but rather on deeply felt animus toward Trump and his agenda.

In the course of this plot, FBI Director James Comey, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI Deputy Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, Strzok’s paramour and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, FBI General Counsel James Baker, and DOJ senior official Bruce Ohr—perhaps among others—compromised federal law enforcement to such an extent that the American public is losing trust. A recent CBS News poll finds 48 percent of Americans believe that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia collusion probe is “politically motivated,” a stunning conclusion. And 63 percent of polled voters in a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll believe that the FBI withheld vital information from Congress about the Clinton and Russia collusion investigations.

Read the rest.

Is 'politicization' the right word? Can one politicize what is already political by its very nature? (The FBI is part of the government; the government is a political entity; ergo, the FBI is political and essentially so; one cannot politicize, i.e., make political, what cannot exist except as political. Might it not be better to say that Comey, McCabe, and the gang are using the FBI for partisan purposes?

I mean: you wouldn't want to say that when functioning properly and in accordance with the Constitution the government and its branches and bureaus is apolitical, would you?

You are free to dismiss these questions as the ruminations of a pedant.

See here.

Islam on Urination, Defecation, and Jihad

Dr. Claude Boisson writes,

 

One mile from where I live in the French city of Lyon, there is an Islamicized neighborhood where I recently bought this (elegantly printed and bound) book in French. 

 

Four pages (46-49) are devoted to how you should urinate and defecate if you are an observant Muslim. And a very elaborate affair it is. Hold your penis with your left hand. Remember that it is forbidden to wipe your bottom with fewer than three stones or with a bone. The description of these 7th century customs from Arabia are piously reprinted in the textbook supposedly read by serious 20th century French-speaking Muslims. 

 

Are we instructed as to the proper disposal of the three soiled stones?  Why wouldn't the bone of an infidel be an appropriate instrument of anal cleansing? 

 

But since I am not a Muslim, I was more interested in the final chapters. Chapter XVI is devoted to jihad (the real thing, not “internal spiritual struggle”) and chapter XVII to the freeing of slaves. For five dollars infidel readers can thus become more knowledgeable about what may await them. 

 

You learn all there is to know about the war booty, the dhimma and such matters. Also please note the Prophet said that if you want to free a slave, it is advisable to do this during a solar eclipse. 

 

You might imagine that this is an edition of an old treatise penned in the fifteenth century. 

 

No. Time has stood still. 

It is a compendium of fiqh written by an Egyptian scholar born in 1954 (not in 1054 or 1454), a former student of al-Azhar. The French translation was published in 2011 by The International Islamic Publishing House, Riyadh.

 

Yes, Islam is a religion. It is also, intrinsically, “political Islam”. Since when? Since the Hegira. 

The main thing is that Islam is a violent, oppressive, totalitarian system inimical to the values and traditions of the West, one which has the support of destructive leftists. It may be too late for Europe and the U. K., but we here in the USA still have a fighting chance of beating back the barbarians.

 

Leftists evince a pronounced libertine 'wobble' en rapport as they are with sexual perversions and 'alternative lifestyles' and are therefore in danger of 'losing their heads' should the Sharia boys come to power.  So their collusion with the latter is a curious thing to behold.

 

What explains it?  My detailed answer in Why the Left Will not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam.

 

I am coming to the view that the qualifier 'radical' in 'radical Islam' is redundant: True Islam is radical by its very nature. Could there be such a person as a moderate Nazi?  I think not. Is 'moderate Muslim' in the same logical boat, a phrase that perhaps applies only to Zuhdi Jasser and a few others? 

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

I post what I like and I like what I post.

Elmore James, Dust My Broom

Doors, Crystal Ship

Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In.

Elvis Presley, Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame

Elvis Presley, Spanish Eyes

Bob Dylan, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Take a Train to Cry, Cutting Edge take. 

Albert King, Crosscut Saw

Ray Charles, Busted.  Made the #4 slot on the Billboard Hot 100 for 1963.

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom.  One of Dylan's greatest anthems.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

An equally powerful version by Janis Joplin

Hoyt Axton, The Pusher

"No Religious Test"

 In Article VI of the U. S. Constitution we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Does it follow that the U. S. Constitution should be so interpreted as to allow a Muslim citizen who supports sharia (Islamic law) to run for public office?  No!  For the same Constitution, in its First Amendment, enjoins a salutary separation of church/synagogue/mosque and state, though not in those words.  Sharia and the values and principles enshrined in the founding documents are incompatible.  On no sane interpretation is our great Constitution a suicide pact.

It is important to realize that Islam is as much  an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion.  Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices. 

Many assume that no restriction may be placed on admissible religions for the purposes of the implementation  of Article VI.  I deny it. A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the "no religious Test" provision. One could argue that on a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.

Or one might argue that Islam is not a religion at all.  Damn near anything can and will be called a religion by somebody.  Some say with a straight face that leftism is a religion, others that Communism is a religion.  Neither is a religion on any adequate definition of 'religion.'  I have heard it said that atheism is a religion.  Surely it isn't.  Is a heresy of a genuine religion itself a religion?  Arguably not.  Hillaire Belloc and others have maintained that Islam is a Christian heresy.  Or one could argue that Islam, or perhaps radical Islam,  is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.  If an X masquerades as a Y, then the X is not a Y. How to define religion is a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of religion. 

The point here is that "religious" in ". . . no religious Test shall ever be required" is subject to interpretation.  We are under no obligation to give it a latitudinarian reading that allows in a destructive ideology incompatible with our values and principles.

Related articles

Christians Flogged For Not Being Good Muslims In Indonesia

What Should We Call Secular Ideologies like Marxism and Social Justice?

Central Planning?

You say you're for it?  Would you still be for it if I could show you that it is virtually certain that you will end up among the centrally planned and not among the central planners?

Bergoglio's Nefarious Machinations

Dr. Vito Caiati writes,

I have very much appreciated the apt title that you bestowed yesterday on the present pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, “Bergoglio the Benighted,” who is indeed the essence of a “leftist knucklehead.” What intrigues and angers me is the absence of any real opposition within the Church to this caudillo and the gang around him. The moral and cultural rot in the Church has indeed advanced very far.

 

The huge historical implications of Bergoglio’s nefarious machinations, all intensifiers and accelerators of this rot,  are succinctly elucidated in an essay by Roberto Pertrici, an historian at the University of Bergamo, which  appears today on Sandro Magister’s blog “Settimo Cielo,” in which Perticci argues that “[il] pontificato di Francesco, credo che si possa ragionevolmente sostenere che esso segna il tramonto di quell’imponente realtà storica definibile come ‘cattolicesimo romano.’” I think that the article is well worth reading, either in Italian or in the English translation that is available. One more sign that we are in big trouble in the West.

Roberto Petrici's essay "The End of Roman Catholicism?" is available in English here.  Read it, ragazzi.

Is Fear Born of Ignorance? Only Sometimes

William Kilpatrick is the best writer at Crisis Magazine. Because he invariably talks sense, I have linked to his work on numerous occasions. It is important that he remain a writer there given that squishy liberal shallow-pates are 'over-represented' among Catholics and have been for a good 60 years, with the current pope, Bergoglio the Benighted, leading the bunch.  The beauty of blog is that I can be appropriately disrespectful of the leftist knucklehead where Kilpatrick cannot.

Here he makes an important point: 

One of the misleading assumptions of our times is that fear is born of ignorance. Its corollary is the belief that increased education or increased familiarity with the “other” will banish fear. For example, after the Italian election results, Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, said that the Church would have to continue its “work of education.”

But, in fact, Italians along with Germans, French, Brits, Dutch, and so on have been drenched for decades in the kind of education that Cardinal Parolin favors. A large part of the curriculum in European schools is devoted to teaching youngsters to respect different races and cultures. Indeed, many European students are given the distinct impression that other cultures are morally superior to their own.

[. . .]

Nice sentiments. But it doesn’t always work that way. For example, the more that Jews in Germany became familiar with the Nazis and their ideology, the more they properly feared them. Likewise, Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs were right to fear the communist takeover of Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, many Europeans and Americans were not fearful enough about the twin threats posed by Nazism and communism. Their naiveté and lack of prudent fear was a major factor in enabling first the Nazis and then the communists to enslave half of Europe.

The same might be said of the pope’s almost complete lack of rational, prudential fear. By encouraging people not to be fearful of a real danger, the pope only adds to the danger. For example, attacks on European Jews have risen sharply in recent years. Jews in Europe are fearful once again—not because of some irrational prejudice on their part, but because of the rise of an ideology every bit as anti-Semitic as that fostered by the Nazis.

Now read the whole thing.

I'll say it again. Xenophobia is an irrational fear of foreigners and things foreign. But not all fear is irrational. If you refuse to make these simple distinctions, then you are being willfully stupid and deserve moral condemnation. It is morally wrong to refuse to use your intellect, especially if you consider it to be God-given.  

Why Would Anybody Need a Knife?

More vicious and willful stupidity from 'liberals' (emphasis added):

In light of that crime spike London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has laid down the law. “No excuses,” he declared the other day on Twitter. “There is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.” 

Britain imposes strict gun control. It also imposes absurdly strict knife control. The government forbids carrying a knife in public “without good reason, unless it has a folding blade with a cutting edge 3 inches long or less.”

Take note: Lock-back knives — the kind in which the blade locks in the open position, to prevent accidental folding while the knife is being held, and thus lacerated fingers — are verboten no matter the blade length. Lock-backs “can include multi-tool knives — tools that also contain other devices such as a screwdriver or can opener.” And a “good reason” for carrying a knife includes using the knife for work, or perhaps “historical reenactment or religious purposes.” Not, say, self-defense, or just because a knife sometimes comes in handy.

On a Putative Counterexample to 'Ought Implies Can'

I have long subscribed to Kant's famous meta-ethical principle according to which our moral obligations cannot outrun our abilities. 'Ought' implies 'can.' If I am under a moral obligation to do X, then I must be able to do X. We are concerned here with moral not legal oughts, and we understand 'ought' in accordance with the principle that if one morally ought to do X, then one is morally obliged/obligated to do X. 

Roughly, if you ought to do something, then it must be possible for you to do it, not just logically, and not just nomologically; it must be possible for you to do it given your actual abilities at a particular time and in definite circumstances.  With a bit more precision:

OC. Necessarily, if agent A ought to do X at time t in circumstances C, then A is able to do X at t and in C.

So if I ought to come to your aid, then I am able to do so.  By contraposition, if I am unable to come to your aid, then it is not the case that I ought to, and I am not subject to moral censure if I fail to. 

Note the logical difference between 'It is not the case that A ought to do X' and 'A ought not to do X.'  To confuse those two would be to commit an operator shift fallacy by importing the negation operator into the negatum.  So the contrapositive of 'ought' implies 'can' is not 'cannot' implies 'ought not,' but 'cannot' implies 'not ought.'  Better still: 'not can' implies 'not ought.'

Now suppose I promise to drive you to the airport at six in the morning. So promising, I morally obligate myself to so doing, i.e., I ought to drive you to the airport at six.  It follows by (OC) that I can drive you to the airport in a very concrete sense of 'can,': I know how to drive; I know how to get to the airport; I have access to a car, no one is preventing me from driving, etc.  Obviously, a carjacking would absolve me of my moral obligation.

My ability in this concrete and specific sense is a necessary condition of my being morally obligated to drive you to the airport.

Putative Counterexample 

Suppose that the night before the airport run I get drunk, sleep through the alarm, wake up late and hungover, and forget to fill up the gas tank in my vehicle.  As a result we run out of gas and you miss your flight.  I am unable to deliver on my promise, and do what the promise obligated me to do, but it seems that I am nonetheless morally responsible and indeed open to moral censure. In this case it seems that 'not can'' does not imply 'not ought.'  It seems that my inability to get you to the airport on time does not absolve me of my moral obligation to perform than very action. For I did something blameworthy by getting drunk the night before.

I am not impressed by counterexamples of this sort.  Touching only the letter, but not the spirit of Kant's great principle, they merely invite a reformulation thereof.  To wit,

OC*. Necessarily, if agent A ought to do X at time t in circumstances C, then A is able to do X at t and in C subject to the proviso that around t and in C A has not done anything to impair his abilities or factors contributing to his abilities.

Governor Moonbeam at the Golden Gate

The Ideology of Illegal Immigration

An outstanding column by VDH. Excerpts:

The entire vocabulary of illegal immigration has become Orwellian. Once descriptive nouns and adjectives such as “alien” and “illegal” have melted into “undocumented” and “immigrant” and then into just “migrant,” ostensibly to mask the reality of both legal status and the fact that migrants go in one direction — and there is an existential difference between immigrants and emigrants.

Excellent point about 'migrant.'  The term blurs the distinction between those who emigrate and those who immigrate as if there is no difference. But as Hanson says, the difference is "existential."  What could that mean? Well, no emigrants but some immigrants pose an existential threat to us, not so much to our physical existence, though I wouldn't point this out to the parents of Kate Steinle, but to our way of life, which is more important.

Here, then,  is another example of what mendacious scum 'liberals' or 'progressives' are.  Instead of addressing the issues in an honest and forthright way, they commit acts of linguistic hijacking.

Remember: he who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.

Once someone makes a decision to enter a country illegally — his first decision as an incoming alien — and thus breaks a U.S. law with impunity, then most subsequent decisions are naturally shaped by the idea of exemption. Zealots argue that entering the U.S. illegally is merely a civil infraction. But the IRS in 2017 identified some 1.2 million identity-theft cases, in which illegal aliens had employed illegitimate or inconsistent social-security numbers to file tax returns — and implicitly thereby cause innumerable problems for the U.S. tax system.

Professor Hanson should have pointed out that illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. Improper entry comes under the criminal code. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime. 

If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.

So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code. 

Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.

So much of the discussion of illegal immigration is predicated not just on fantasy, but on Soviet-style censorship, and not just of speech, but of our very thoughts. Taboo are suggestions that illegal immigration could be a prime reason that California now has the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation; the highest number of welfare recipients (one of three in the United States), with a fifth of the state living below the poverty level; and now a fourth of all hospital admittances found to be suffering from diabetes or prediabetes; or that national rankings of infrastructure quality place the state nearly last in the country.

 Talk of race has approached something like Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass, in which everything is upside down. “La Raza” — until recently the nomenclature of the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy organization — has supposedly nothing to do with race, while others who would never have an odious desire to use its odious English equivalent, “The Race,” are deemed racists for their objections to La Raza terminology.

Residency is deliberately conflated with citizenship, as if the two are legally and morally equivalent. But again, nowhere else in the world is this true, and certainly not in Mexico. I have lived abroad for over two years. As a guest in Athens, I followed Greek politics closely. I paid steep Greek sales taxes and assorted fees and tariffs as a legal resident alien. But at no time did I imagine that taxes or my physical presence as a lawful guest on Greek soil allowed me to interfere with the politics of my host, much less to issue demands on Athens, or to give me de facto the same legal rights as Greek citizens. As a legal alien, I surely did not think I could vote. I knew better than to tell Greeks that their country was not to my taste. And I knew fellow aliens who overstayed visas, worked without permits, and did not register as foreign residents. At least before the days of the latest incarnations of the European Union, the resulting fines were stiff, and expulsions were uncontested.

Once again one sees what utter misological filth these leftists are. They will engage in any kind of obfuscation to win while we waste time being polite.

I have made the point recently that the constant yapping about 'democracy' aids and abets the conflation of residency with citizenship.  Leftists just love that word. When you hear it from their mouths know that nasty obfuscation and sophistry is on the way.

When Jerry Brown or Nancy Pelosi lectures the state on its illiberality, or on the immigration sins of Donald Trump, or the advantages of nullification and a sanctuary state, we assume that these are just the penultimate chest poundings and virtue signals of rich septuagenarians about to go into apartheid retirements in Napa or Grass Valley.

In that context, all of their legacies above make perfect sense.

Indeed, they do. These ancient knuckleheads will depart the scene with their virtue intact while leaving behind a crap hole for others to live in. I can't bring myself to believe that these two clowns are animated by evil intentions; the consequences of their folly, however, are evil in excelsis. Pelosi in particular is not so much evil as just plain stupid. It says a lot about the electorate that she should have had so much power for so long.  

Barbara Ehrenreich Gives Up on Preventative Care

Very interesting, and not irrational given her age:

In the last few years I have given up on the many medical measures—cancer screenings, annual exams, Pap smears, for example—expected of a responsible person with health insurance. This was not based on any suicidal impulse.

Younger than Ehrenreich, I will continue to exercise what is called 'due diligence.'  

Via Rod Dreher who adds his commentary.

Dreher has become a daily read for me. But I have to wonder: how can so prolific a writer and family man have any time left over for the practices of the Ben Op? I mean meditation, prayer, spiritual reading, and the rest. It's easy to get sucked in, Rod. Be careful. This world's a vanishing quantity, not that you don't believe it.

Those who aspire to live well must learn to curtail their consumption of mass communication media. 

Meditation on the Third Commandment

A 1941 article by C. S. Lewis. (HT: Victor Reppert)

The Third Commandment in the ordering preferred by Protestants of Lewis' stripe is the one about taking the Lord's name in vain: 

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Lewis meditates on the difficulties that must beset attempts to form a political party animated by Christian principles.

Christians may be expected to agree on the general ends of good government, but that agreement does not suffice for a political party. What one needs for a political party, which by its very nature is oriented toward concrete actions in the here and now, is the championship  of very specific means. But then bitter contention over these means is unavoidable and our incipient Christian party breaks apart into competing factions.

The cynosure of Lewis' disapprobation, I take it, is the invocation of God to justify one's very specific political means. One who does that takes the name of the Lord in vain.

One is put in mind of Dylan's With God On Its Side.

Kevin Williamson and John Derbyshire

The Atlantic's firing of Kevin Williamson elicited howls of protest from National Review writers. But then I remembered Derbyshire's Defenestration of a few years ago.

Methinks there should be less howling and more examination of conscience among the boy-tie boys.

The Left is inimical to free speech and open inquiry. They are deeply and diversely destructive as I document on a daily basis. The pushback of establishment conservatives, however, is a weak and timorous thing.

But who can blame them? They have a good thing going and they are eager to protect their privileges and perquisites. They want to be liked and they want to be respected.  So they self-censor. They need to be more manly and martial and less conciliatory.  

But courage is the hardest of the virtues. Its display can cost you your friends, your livelihood, and your life.

Thinking about this, I guessed that others have engaged the topic in greater detail than I care to. I guessed right.  Here is one such effort. 

Related articles

Maverick Philosopher: The Maoist Left in the U. S.

Fallacious Liberal-Left 'Reasoning' about Race

Heather Mac Donald:

The GAO [General Accounting Office] found that black students get suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students nationally, a finding consistent with previous analyses. The Obama Education and Justice Departments viewed that disproportion as proof of teacher and principal bias. Administration officials used litigation and the threatened loss of federal funding to force schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions radically in order to eliminate racial disparities in discipline. 

The argument is essentially this:

1) Black students get suspended at a higher rate than white students.

Therefore

2) Teachers and principals are biased against black students.

Clearly, this is a howling non sequitur. (Non sequitur is Latin for it does not follow.)  To make the above into a valid argument one would have to add something like the following premise:

0) Black and white students are behaviorally equal: equally well-behaved or equally ill-behaved.

In the presence of (0), the conclusion follows.

But (0) is manifestly false. For support of this claim, see Mac Donald's article:

According to federal data, black male teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white male teenagers of the same age (the category “white” in this homicide data includes most Hispanics; if Hispanics were removed from the white category, the homicide disparity between blacks and whites would be much higher). That higher black homicide rate indicates a failure of socialization; teen murderers of any race lack impulse control and anger-management skills. Lesser types of juvenile crime also show large racial disparities. It is fanciful to think that the lack of socialization that produces such elevated rates of criminal violence would not also affect classroom behavior. While the number of black teens committing murder is relatively small compared with their numbers at large, a very high percentage of black children—71 percent—come from the stressed-out, single-parent homes that result in elevated rates of crime.

The same pattern of invalid argumentation is found across the Left.  Leftists regularly assume that different groups are empirically equal. They then incorrectly take the fact that there is no equality of outcome as proof that something nefarious was at work whether racism or sexism or ageism.

But what explains the eagerness of leftists to adopt such an obviously false assumption?

I proffer an explanation in The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom.

Questioning Bobby Fischer

Good writing, paragraph one:

There is no place on earth more (less?) ideal than Jerusalem for pondering the mysteries of existence, and for a not-insignificant number of people mysteries don’t get more engrossing than the self-exile of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. The all-time great retreated into obscurity—and, later, derangement—at the age of 32, shortly after refusing to defend his 1972 world championship, which he captured against Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky. Fischer played tantalizingly little high-level chess after 1972, joined a cult for a time, and then became a full-blown anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Having died in 2008, he is no longer alive to explain himself, but dwelling on the irrevocable and insoluble past is of course part of the reason to come to Jerusalem in the first place.

Related:

Ayn Rand on Bobby Fischer

Remembering Robert J. Fischer

Related articles

Drunk on genocide: How alcohol fuelled the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews

Newmark's Door: "Bobby Fischer's 21-move brilliancy"