Maverick Philosopher

The Political Equivalent of Divorce?

You've heard me say that we need to find the political equivalent of divorce if we are to reduce the animosity that threatens to destroy us as a nation. But the marital analogy limps badly. Although I don't think much of Damon Linker, he talks sense here:

Part of me gravitates to a fantasy of divorce. Maybe both sides would be happier if we just separated and went our separate ways, like unhappy spouses who call it quits after a few-too-many wounding arguments and rounds of couples therapy.

But of course that's delusional. A nation isn't like a marriage — certainly not companionate marriage based on individual choice. But it's not even a more traditional arranged marriage where there is a period of youthful independence before the union is announced and formalized. Unless you're an immigrant, your country is where you find ourselves at birth. It's a given — like a family in which you are born and raised before you even come to complete self-awareness. It shapes your outlook on the world in more ways than you can ever fully grasp.

Families can break up, tear themselves asunder, but it usually isn't pretty. Neither are divorces. But at least a divorce takes places within a legal and moral frame that persists outside the marriage. Certain rules abide and apply to both parties, guiding the division of marital assets and looking out for the welfare of any children, with an impartial judge overseeing and enforcing it all. There is no such external structure when an extended family breaks apart into feuding factions.

Linker ends on this encouraging note:

Do we hate each other? And if we do, what are our viable options as a polity? I don't know how to answer those questions.

Me neither.  There are options, of course, but I don't see any as particularly viable.  Perhaps a long hot civil war that spills an ocean of blood might bring leftists to their senses, but the prospect of a couple of decades of extreme civil disorder is not an appetizing one.

Democrat Extremism Has Deep Roots

Issues and Insights:

While the Democrats’ lurch to port looks like a recent event, it’s been decades in the making. The party has been a comfortable home to closeted authoritarians for decades. Its big government agenda is a safe harbor for socialists, statists, coercionists, and sworn enemies of liberty.

Democrats have a history of rejecting civil society in favor of political society. They have long believed all ills, both the real and imagined, can and should be resolved by government intervention. The party has rejected freedom and individualism and adopted a collectivist mindset that needs a fortune (always someone else’s) in tax revenues to function.

A man is known by the company he keeps and this is true of political parties. Long before anyone was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, Democrats were supporting some of history’s worst tyrants. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is a Sandinista devotee, as is Sanders, who made a “sympathizer” trip to the Soviet Union in 1988, and believed that Fidel Castro was just a prince of a fellow who generously kept “his” people fed, housed, and schooled.

[. . .]

The roots of today’s Democratic Party reach deep into the red soil of socialism and anchor the real and implied violence of extremism. The dense and twisted forest is nearly grown now, with more than three-fourths of Democrats saying they would vote for a socialist presidential candidate, according to a Gallup poll taken earlier this year. Anyone wondering why many of our big cities are under siege from rioters can quickly figure out why just by looking at that poll.

Civil society and its institutions form the buffer zone between the individual and the State. As the Democrats lurch ever leftward, they hollow out ever more of the buffer zone with the goal of eliminating it entirely. The Obama-Biden administration’s wildly radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule is a prime example. Fortunately, President Trump put a stop to it.  But the Left never rests in its quest to quash liberty and empower an omni-invasive State apparatus.  It is undeniable that the Democrat Party is now a hard-Left party.  This is not the party of your father or even of your older brother.   If you are still a Democrat, I ask that you make sure you understand what this party now stands for.

The New Right: More Combative, Less Conservative

Culturally, the Left won; so what's to conserve? The Old Right, bow-tied and bespectacled, gentlemanly and erudite, has proven impotent to slow down, let alone stop, the Left's long march through the institutions and their subversion of them. Assembled in their well-appointed 'cucksheds,' the likes of George F. Will fiddle with ideas while the Republic burns.  Enter the New Right which, as David Azzerad puts it,

. . . is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her.

As such, this new Right has a decidedly unconservative temperament. It is spirited, manly, and combative. We fight with the same intensity, resolve, and clarity of purpose with which the Left fights. And we fight not to stem our losses, but to win. As Pat Buchanan once wrote, we “want to engage the Left on every front; to defund it; to drive it back into the redoubts whence it emerged decades ago. We want to return to their places of honor the republican beliefs, cultural norms and moral values we were raised with.”

This new Right understands not just ideas, but power. The Left’s ideological hegemony is not principally the result of better ideas, but of its long march through the institutions. We understand the need to build new institutions—in particular those with the power to shape public opinion—and to reconquer lost ones or, at the very least, defund them. The universities, in particular, must be brought to heel.

Absolutely. Defunding the leftist seminaries is a job each of us can do right now.  Every day brings news of a new outrage and an additional reason to divest the institutions of the Higher Enstupidation.  For example,  the cancellation of Mike Adams, and that of Flannery O'Connor by Loyola University Maryland.

The Catholic Universities are among the worst of the leftist seminaries. They are neither Catholic nor universities. 

Related: Defunding: The Most Effective Weapon in Our Arsenal?

Addendum (7/31): "Every day brings news of a new outrage . . . ." A bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Just this morning I learned that a dean at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell was fired for stating in an e-mail that "black lives matter, but also, everyone's life matters."

Alan Watts and John Deck

Ah, the wonders of the Internet!

If you are old-school and intellectually and morally disciplined like me, with the old virtues firmly in place, it is a wonderfully useful tool, and not damaging, except perhaps as a bit of a time-sink.  I coined a word in an earlier entry, schlepfussing. Original with me? A search with DuckDuckGo turned up nothing. But a search on schlepfuss (drag-foot) brought me to this entry by James J. O'Meara, There and Then: Personal and Memorial Reflections on Alan Watts (1915-1973)

Alan Watts was a significant contributor to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s.  Just as many in those days were 'turned on' to philosophy by Ayn Rand, others such as myself were pushed toward philosophy by, among other things,  Alan Watts and his writings.  But early on I realized that there was much of the pied piper and sophist about him.  He once aptly described himself as a "philosophical entertainer" as opposed to an academic philosopher.  Entertaining he was indeed.

I heard him speak on 17 January 1973 in the last year of his life .  He appeared to be well into his cups that evening, though in control.  Alcohol may have been a major contributor to his early death at age 58 on 16 November 1973. (See Wikipedia)  Here is a journal entry of mine written 18 January 1973 that reports on the lecture I heard at El Camino Junior College.

What struck me about O'Meara's post was his reference to John N. Deck. From Watts to Deck! Now there's a weird transition.  O'Meara on Deck:

Was Watts, then, a (shudder) “father figure”? Perhaps. Further evidence might lie ahead.

For, after whimsically choosing to attend an unheralded college in provincial Ontario (again, remarkable lack of parental supervision, they being happy as long as it was a Catholic college), I had decided to major in Philosophy, since that seemed to be where Watts’ ideas seemed to have led, and as noted, my parents had no interest in any practical results of my studies.[14] Fortunately, Windsor, in its very backwardness, was more like the sort of seminaries Watts was familiar with, teaching Aristotle and St. Thomas, rather than the modern, analytic schools that Watts loathed, where one “does” philosophy from 9 to 5 and then home to martinis.[15] I did dabble a bit in Asian Studies, and Religious Studies, but not at all in Psychology, but they were clearly as limited to specialists as Watts would have thought.[16]

Besides, since Watts advocated a “no-practice” approach to spirituality,[17] there didn’t seem to be any need, or much point, in undertaking anything but a theoretical path.[18]

And sure enough, though apparently wandering aimlessly and un-guidedly through the venia legendi, I found myself smack dab under the influence of another likely “father figure,” Prof. John Norbert Deck, PhD.[19]

Now Deck, though apparently rather more anti-Semitic than even most of his generation,[20] did show a propensity to create what Kevin MacDonald has called the “Jewish Guru Effect,” the creation of authoritarian study groups around charismatic figures, often involving the creation of private languages to keep outsiders at bay.[21]

Looking like Schopenhauer but dressed as a Trotskyite shop steward, Deck was easily the most oddly charismatic professor around, and I eagerly joined his Neoplatonic cult.[22] In an unprecedented burst of enthusiasm, I completed my coursework in little more two years, and eagerly entered the more private realms of the graduate seminar. Whereupon, the heavy-smoking, heavy-German-food-eating Deck dropped dead, in his mid-fifties.

That’s right, dear readers, two mentors, both almost immediately dead. And I was barely twenty![23]

[18] Deck, in fact, made quite a study of theoria among the Greeks; see his doctoral dissertation, Nature, Contemplation and the One (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967; Burdett, NY: Larson, 1998), Appendix A; while the text of my Introduction to Philosophy class, Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1952; new translation by Gerald Malsbary, with an Introduction by Roger Scruton, South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998) promoted, based on St. Thomas if not Guénon, the need for a caste devoted to pure contemplation. This was an easy transition from Watts, whom a contemporary reviewer considered to be “one of the few contemporary [1953!] philosophers for whom contemplative reflection precedes action in the world.” — Columbus and Rice, p. 7, quoting P. Wheelwright.

[19] It occurs to me that both Watts and Deck had huge families, with over 12 children and grandchildren, although Deck, the more traditional Catholic, had but one, obviously rather put-upon, wife.

And then it dawned on me that this O'Meara is the same O'Meara to whom Anthony Flood links here. Follow the link for more biographical information about Deck, and copies of some of his articles.

For an evaluation of some of Deck's ideas, see the articles in my Deck category.

Old Left and New Left

A succinct differentiation:

The New Left retained the values and ultimate goals of the Old Left. They also retained elements of their philosophical framework. They then set about spreading their ideas throughout the culture by means of propaganda and institutional subversion. And they won. Aside from Cuba and North Korea, orthodox Communism is dead. Capitalism seems everywhere triumphant. And yet in the realm of culture, leftist values are completely hegemonic. The left lost the Cold War, but they won the peace.

There Have Always Been Crises

My wife just now handed me a book from her library, one that I had read in the '70s, but had forgotten, The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater. It was published in 1970 by the Beacon Press (Boston). It bears the subtitle, "American Culture at the Breaking Point."

Somehow we didn't break: here we are schlepfussing along 50 years later. Things are arguably worse now, but it's a huge topic and not my present one.  I just want to say that there have always been crises. So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.

In February 1945, the university building in which Hartmann used to lecture was destroyed in an aerial bombing and all his classes were suspended. He was then living in Berlin, which had been transformed into a real-life inferno. Without teaching obligations, Hartmann decided to write his aesthetics book, completing the first draft in the period from March to September 1945. Perhaps the most fascinating book in his entire opus [corpus], there is no despair in it over war and violence, maimed bodies, and destroyed buildings. As a boy he learned to measure the movement of the stars against the objects on earth, and now he measured the events of the day against the eternal beauty of Bach's music, the portraits of Rembrandt, the dramas of Shakespeare, and the novels of Dostoevsky. He delivers a remarkable message:wherever we are and whatever events pull us into their currents, we should not lose sight [of] and cease to strive toward the highest and most sublime. (Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 159.)

 

Can a Dead Animal be Buried?

Arguably not. Here is an argument:

1) A dead animal can be buried if and only if it is identical to its corpse.

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Therefore

3) It is not the case that a dead animal can be buried.

Argument for (2):

4) If a dead animal is identical to its corpse, then it survives its death as a corpse.

5) No animal survives its death as a corpse.

Therefore

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Suppose you hear that I was involved in a terrible auto accident. You ask whether I survived. You get the response, "Yes, here he is in the morgue. The good news is that he survived; the bad news is that he is dead." If you find that response absurd, then you will accept (5) and with it (3), and you will understand that a dead animal cannot be buried. You will agree that you cannot bury me, "on the lone prarie" or anywhere; you can only bury my corpse which is not me. Even if I am only a living human body, I am not identical to 'my' corpse either before death or after it.

 

When an animal dies, it ceases to exist, and you cannot bury what does not exist.

But intuitions differ. Suppose that a 200 lb. man dies in his bed, and that a man is just a living material thing.  If the man ceased to exist at death, but the 200 lb. mass in the bed did not, then something new came into existence in the bed, a corpse. If that sounds absurd, you may be tempted to say that one and the same thing that was alive is now dead, and that that one thing  will be buried. So you did bury old Uncle Joe after all and not merely his remains.  And the old cowboy's request not to be buried on the lone prarie, where the coyotes howl and wind blows free, makes sense.

Welcome to the aporetics of death and burial.

Happiness

The happy are those who do not allow themselves to be much affected, and certainly not disturbed, by the judgments and expectations of others. How much validation by others do you need? The less you need, the more mature you are.

Word of the Day: Gallimaufry

A gallimaufry is a hodgepodge. 

The word is of course white-supremacist so be careful  of the contexts in which you use it, assuming you dare use it.  After all, if correct grammar is racist, as per the Rutgers English Department, then a large vocabulary must also be.  Don't forget: anything blacks are poor at is ipso facto racist, and that holds in spades for ipso facto.

'Gallimaufry'  is also a useless word and for two reasons. First, 'liberals' have so eroded standards that almost all have impoverished vocabularies; hence nothing will be communicated by the use of this word.

Second, in this Age of Levelling, the  use of the word in question will be perceived as effete, and possibly epicene; you will be thought to be putting on airs.  It is a verbal bow tie.

Wokery in Waco

Baptist Baylor goes Marxist.

This Man is a Racist?

Two-minute video. Judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their hair.

Practice Automotive Distancing!

Let it Go!

You allow mental clutter to collect in memory, and then you repeatedly sift through it, keeping it alive and present. What good is the memorial rehearsal of failures, foibles, and fatuities, of missed opportunities, and unpleasant encounters?

Let it go, not quite forgetting the details, but relaxing one's grip on them, while preserving the lessons.

A Not So Happy Warrior

Mark Steyn on Mike Adams (1964-2020):

He "seemed like" a happy warrior, but who knows? It's a miserable, unrelenting, stressful life, as the friends fall away and the colleagues, who were socially distant years before Covid, turn openly hostile. There are teachers who agree with Mike Adams at UNCW and other universities - not a lot, but some - and there are others who don't agree but retain a certain queasiness about the tightening bounds of acceptable opinion ...and they all keep their heads down. So the burthen borne by a man with his head up, such as Adams, is a lonely one, and it can drag you down and the compensations (an invitation to discuss your latest TownHall column on the radio or cable news) are very fleeting.

Politeness and the Belief in Objectivity Really Do Have to Go

And you wonder why blacks are on the bottom?

New Lingo: 'Cuckshed' and 'Wankerati'

Where the cuckservatives hang out. And what the 'wokerati' really are.

George Will and Other 'Conservative' Castrati Back Biden

Here

Trump Delivers Once Again and Ends AFFH

This is a major victory against the Left.  Stanley Kurtz:

I am pleased to report that President Trump and Secretary Carson have together put an end to the Obama-Biden administration’s wildly radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. President Trump has delivered on this issue in a way that will preserve American liberty in general, and the freedom and self-government of America’s suburbs in particular.

Perhaps you saw Kurtz on Life, Liberty, and Levin last night. An impressive guest on the best political show on TV. 

Cancel the New York Times!

Richard Samuelson, Claremont Review of Books

La Decadenza

Dr. Vito Caiati writes:

Relevant to your post “The ‘Catholic’ ‘Universities’ Have Become Jokes: Fordham,” I call your attention to an interview by Marco Tossati of Archbishop Viganò, defender of the faith, on the evil that permeates the Bergoglian regime and the much of the Church, the “three elements” of which the latter characterizes as “heresy, sodomy, and corruption –[which] are so recurrent that they are almost a trademark of the deep state and of the deep church.”

As the interview, The Pope and the Sodomites, makes clear, here, we are generally dealing not with what you term “the unwitting agents of the demonic” but rather with fully conscious ones, who are bringing one of the greatest institutions and religious traditions of our civilization to ruin.  The cycle of decay in the Church and in Western society at large is rapidly accelerating . The moral horrors and violence that we are now witnessing in society, culture, and politics, orchestrated by the Left,  were largely unimaginable only a few years ago. This is not going to end well. “Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle against the wickedness and snares of the devil….”

I too do not see how this can end well.  The Left is now drawing from a cesspool of nihilism that  is reasonably viewed as literally demonic. The Unholy Spirit of he who "always negates" presides over them. But I still maintain that most of the agents of destruction "know not what they do":  they are foolish, pampered youth, products of an affluent and permissive society, brought up with no moral training by materialistic parents . . . in short, useful idiots, or as I say,  useless idiots.

BLM is Playing by the Book. Alinsky's Book

Michael Brown:

In his insightful, 2009 mini-book, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, David Horowitz quoted an SDS radical who wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

As Horowitz explained, “In other words the cause — whether inner city blacks or women — is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all-consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals.”

When it comes to BLM, the purported issue, namely, that Black Lives Matter, is not the ultimate issue. Instead, a larger cultural revolution is the ultimate issue. (As many have noted, the founders of BLM are both Marxists and radical feminists, with two of the three women identifying as queer activists.)

And so, the mantra that “Black Lives Matter” specifically means blacks who are victims of white police brutality. Black lives in the womb do not matter. Blacks getting gunned down in gang violence do not matter. Black toddlers killed in random shootings do not matter. Not even blacks killed by black police officers matter — at least not nearly as much as blacks killed by white officers.

Those white officers, in turn, represent the larger system, which, we are told, is fundamentally racist. And it is that system that needs to be overthrown.

Thus, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Read it all, comrades.

Grammar is Propadeutic to Logic

So if grammar is 'racist,' then so is logic.

What is the criterion whereby a subject or activity is deemed 'racist' by leftists?  It appears to be this:  Whatever blacks and other 'people of color' are poor at is 'racist.' 

And what is at the back of that criterion?  It appears to be the assumption that we are all inherently equal, both as individuals and as groups, in all respects, and not just in respect of political rights.  Now we all believe in equality of rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; those among us with experience of life and good sense, however, know that there are all sorts of empirically measurable respects in which individuals and groups are not equal.  To take one of many examples, Asian students are superior to black students in point of knowledge of, and aptitude for, mathematics. 

Do I need to belabor this point among my astute readers? (Full disclosure: I am not now, and never have been Asian, and it is biologically impossible that I should ever become Asian.)

But if you foolishly believe that we are all inherently equal in every respect, with the same abilities and interests, then you may be tempted to embrace the following unsound argument:

A. We are all inherently equal in every respect. But:

B. This equality does not manifest itself as equality of outcome or result. Therefore:

C. There has to be a factor that prevents equality of outcome or result. And:

D. That factor is racism, both individual and 'systemic.'

This argument is multiply-flawed. But if you read this weblog, that very fact is evidence that you have the mental equipment to determine on your own where the flaws lie.  Why do I have to do all the work?

An Example of White-Supremacist Hate Speech

This is ugly stuff. You have been warned!  I link to it because of my commitment to free speech and open inquiry.

Thought, Prayer, Meditation

"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain and discover the impasses.  It is merely a means of "consolidating our perplexities." (E. Cioran). It is the failure of thinking that leads us to pray, and the limitations of prayer that lead us to meditate  and wait, like Weil, in silence.  (Curious it is that Simone Weil was a student of Alain.)

So I say: Prayer is when night descends on thought, and meditation is when night descends on (discursive) prayer.  But all three are needed for a complete human life. Each of us should aspire to be a thinker, a believer, and a mystic with triple citizenship in Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares.

How to Prepare for a Communist Coup

Good practical advice. I won't summarize it. You read it.  HT: Mendocino Joe.

The Ability to Write and to Comprehend a Good, Long Sentence . . .

. . . is one mark of an educated mind. You won't learn this in the English Department of Rutgers, however. Example:

If you value the life of the mind, the pursuit of truth, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, high culture and its transmission, in short, the classical values of the university as set forth in such great works as John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University,  then you should withdraw all support from the culturally Marxist indoctrination centers that the vast majority of contemporary 'universities' have become.

A good stylist, I will add, varies the length of his sentences.   (And a good upholder of traditional values insists on his right to use standard English.)

The 'universities' of the present day are more an impediment to the development of an educated mind than  a help. You don't need them.  Do your bit to defund them.

Note the difference between 'good, long sentence' and 'good long sentence.'

The 'Catholic' 'Universities' Have Become Jokes: Fordham

I continue with the examples. Fordham, the other day:

Fordham University is persecuting a student for speech that shouldn’t even be all that controversial. Surely the Jesuits who run the school aren’t afraid of honest debate?

At issue are two Instagram posts last month from Austin Tong, age 21: one implicitly criticizing anti-police protests and another showing himself holding a rifle to memorialize the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Divest the 'universities.' Enough academentia.

Is 'Looters' Racist?

But of course!

Blacks are 'over-represented' among looters. It would be racist to hold blacks to civilized standards of behavior because such behavior is not 'who they are.' Therefore, any use of 'looters' is racist.

Is that the 'reasoning'? I'm just asking.  See here:

At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word “looters,” which has been used many times in the paper, now has “a pejorative and racist connotation” and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should “talk to your immediate supervisor.” Translation: Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed. So what to call looters? Non-paying shoppers? That doesn’t quite tell the story: Ordinary shoplifters don’t usually bust up all the windows. How about self-appointed retail-justice-commandos? Revolutionary mass goods-redistribution agents?

'Liberals' can't think, but they are really good at associational slides. Their thinking is slurry and surreal and 'morphy' and muddled. One thing reminds them of another and morphs into it.   Their 'thinking' is feculent, a byproduct -- of con-fusion.  An intercranial crapstorm. Foolish and flushable.

'Blacklist' is another word the Pee-Cee Brigade wants to ban.  But then what about 'white out' and 'red line' and 'brown nose' and 'Code Yellow'?

'Liberals' need re-education. We'll begin building the camps at the start of Trump's third term.  He will no doubt get a third term by simply refusing to leave. Ask Nancy Pelosi. 

If We Lose Locke, We Lose America

Ben Shapiro, Prager U, 5:05.

An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism

Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising:

Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end).

Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical skeptics are evil; rather, our inability to counter radical skepticism and to be sure about our knowledge of reality is an evil).

Premise 3: God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will (creating another evil) -- e.g., a skeptic who dies and goes to heaven may still not be convinced that he or she is not under an illusion created by a Cartesian demon; heaven could be part of the illusion.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

I accept the first two premises. With respect to the second, I have long believed that our deep and irremediable ignorance on matters of great importance to us is a major evil and germane both to the case for God's nonexistence, but also to the anti-natalist case.  (Atheists who argue to the nonexistence of God from evil ought to consider whether the manifold evils of this world don't also put paid to the notion that human life is worth living and propagating.)

I balk, however, at the third premise. Schneider seems to be assuming that the origin of radical skepticism is in a free decision not to accept some putative givenness.  There is, I admit, the willful refusal on the part of certain perverse individuals to accept the evident, and even the self-evident; as I see it, however, the origin of radical skepticism is not in a free refusal to accept what is evident or self-evident, but in a set of considerations that the skeptic finds compelling.  A skeptic is not a willful denier, but a doubter, and indeed one whose doubt is in the service of cognition. He doesn't doubt for the sake of doubting, but for the sake of knowing. The skeptic wants to know, but he has high standards: he wants objective certainty, not mere subjective conviction. He doubts whatever can be doubted in order to arrive at epistemic bedrock.  This is what motivates the hyperbolic doubt of the Dream Argument and the considerations anent the evil genius.

I therefore reject the claim that "God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will . . . ."  Free will doesn't come into it. Heaven is the Beatific Vision, and in that vision there will be such a perfect coalescence of finite knower and Infinite Object that no doubt can arise. In the visio beata, radical skepticism will not be possible.  A mundane analog is supplied by the experience of a sensory quale such as a felt pain, or rather pleasure.  In the moment that one feels it, one cannot doubt it, so long as one attends to its phenomenal features alone and brackets (in Husserl's sense) all external considerations as to causes, effects, etc.  The phenomenology is indubitable whatever may be the case with the etiology.

So if heaven is the Beatific Vision, heaven cannot be illusory.  But this highly refined, highly Platonic, Thomist take on heaven is not for everyone. It is not for Protestants whose conception is cruder.  I call that conception Life 2.0 and I contrast in with the Thomist conception in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision ?  On a crude conception, according to which Jethro will be united after death with his faithful hound 'Blue,' drink home brew, and hunt rabbits, there is room for illusion.  It could be that there is a whole series of quasi-material 'spiritual' heavens above the sublunary but shy of the ultimate heaven of the Beatific Vision, but I won't pursue that speculation here.

It just so happens that I am now reading Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence (Marquette UP, 1999), which is a translation of L'Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas. On p. 35, we read:

By a profoundly logical coincidence the beatific vision, which is the final cause of the world and ultimate perfection of the created spirit, is also, according to Thomas, the only example of a created knowledge other than the intuitions of personal consciousness which seizes and possesses being such as it is, directly, not only without abstraction but with no mediation whatever. The beatific vision is perfect intellection with regard both to its object and to its mode of operation; on this account we must study it here; otherwise it would be impossible to have an exact idea of what intellection is in itself.

This text supports my analogy above. "The intuitions of personal consciousness" are the felt qualia I referred to.  These are "created knowledges" Writ Very Small, paltry sublunary analogs (e.g., the smell of burnt toast) of the ultimate coalescence of subject and object in the visio beata. But in both the sublunary and beatific cases, Being (esse) is seized and possessed directly, not via abstract concepts and without the mediation of epistemic deputies and mediators.  Being is grasped itself and not via representations. The little mysticisms of sensation prefigure the Big Mysticism of Ultimate Beatitude.

My prose is starting to 'flow French,' but I trust you catch my drift.

 

Defund the 'Universities' If You Value the Life of the Mind

If you value the life of the mind, the pursuit of truth, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, high culture and its transmission, in short, the classical values of the university as set forth in such great works as John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University,  then you should withdraw all support from the culturally Marxist indoctrination centers that the vast majority of contemporary 'universities' have become.

Not to mention that they have become a scam and a sham as is widely recognized:

As recently as 1980, you could get a four-year bachelor’s degree at a public school for less than $10,000. These days, it’ll cost you $40,000 at a minimum, $140,000 for a private school, or well over $250,000 for a top school.

College costs have ballooned beyond all reason. They’ve risen even faster than healthcare costs, which is really saying something. Kids are burying themselves in debt—$1.6 trillion at last count—in order to attend college.

When I wrote about this last year, I had little hope things would change anytime soon. Why? It’s a tough sell to convince an 18-year-old kid not to attend the four-year party all his friends are going to, especially when the US government is financing it through student loans.

The Corona virus, however, will play a major role in bringing down the leftist seminaries:

Mark my words: coronavirus will be remembered for transforming college forever. The virus has forced practically every college to move their courses online for the next semester. So instead of living on campus and walking to lectures, kids will be sitting in their bedrooms watching professors on Zoom calls.

This is FAR more disruptive than most folks realize. College is about much more than just the learning. There’s the education, and then you have the experience. The learning part has barely changed in a century. Kids still sit in 60-year-old lecture halls listening to professors.

But now, the “experience” has been stripped away. Do you think teenagers will be willing to mortgage their futures in order to watch college lecture videos on the internet?

Read it all.

What is Islam?

A religion like the other great religions?  A Christian heresy? A totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion? A hybrid political-religious ideology?

Islam is Government.

Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

The spirit of the Left is the spirit of negativity. Any intellectually honest person following current events can see that the tendency of leftists is mindlessly to destroy for the sake of destruction what it has taken centuries to build. Transgressive of tradition and its wisdom, these 'progressives' are both hobbled and enabled by their presentism. Hobbled, because they know nothing of the past. Enabled, because their ignorance allows them to imagine themselves to be free of the moral limitations of humanity. Punks and know-nothings for the most part, they are unwitting agents of the demonic.

In Faust, Goethe gives Mephistopheles the following lines:

Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles was entsteht 
Ist werth daß es zu Grunde geht;
Drum besser wär’s daß nichts entstünde. So ist denn alles was ihr Sünde,
Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt, 
Mein eigentliches Element. (V. 1338–1344)

I cannot improve upon Walter Kaufmann's translation:

I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
'Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent --
That is my proper element.

Vito Caiati (7/24) responds:

In yesterday’s post “Negativity: The Spirit of the Left,” which includes an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust and which terminates with the statement, “Punks and know-nothings for the most part, they are unwitting agents of the demonic,” you obliquely suggest a lien [Vito slips into French here: link, connection] between the ongoing leftist annihilationist campaign [against] the Western cultural, historical, and religious heritage and malevolent supernatural forces or entities. Am I right in assuming that this was your intention?  Or are you employing the adjective “demonic” in a more generic, figurative sense to speak of evil?

I mean 'demonic' literally. It is not that the vandals are themselves literally demons, but that they are being used by demonic forces, the "principalities and powers" that St. Paul speaks of.  Here is a short video by N. T. Wright on the meaning of the phrase.  Leftism at bottom is nihilistic, and this nihilism has a metaphysical source in the rebellious spirit who "always negates" and can accept no legitimate authority.  So what is playing out before our eyes is something very deep and metaphysical: Unseen Warfare.  Or is that OTT, to use a going abbreviation?

Your question also raises the question whether there can be evil without agents of evil.  Aquinas held that evil is a privation with no positive entitative status, a lack of good, privatio boni.  A stock example is blindness in the eye: the blindness is a lack of sight. But it seems to that there is a positivity about evil that could only be accounted for by evil agents, with evil free wills, for example, the Antifa or BLM thug that blinds a police officer permanently by shining a laser in his eyes, as happened the other night. 

Is Grammar Racist?

It has to be. Whatever blacks and other 'people of color' are not good at is racist; blacks and other 'people of color' are not good at grammar; ergo, etc.  This also explains why logic, mathematics, natural science, chess, self-control, self-reliance, deferral of gratification, pulling up your pants, etc. are all racist.

It is also clear that in this Age of Pan-Racism, when everything is racist, grammar, etc. is racist. Racism is itself racist!

Seriously, the Rutgers English Department is in dire need of 'cancellation' or at least fumigation. Here:

In short, the Rutgers English Department wants to make sure that students who come to Rutgers with a poor grasp of standard written English not only remain in that state, but come to believe that learning standard English is a concession to racism. I remember when keeping "people of color" ignorant was considered part of white supremacy.

An Unedifying Spectacle

Polemics has a place in politics, but in philosophy?

Feser versus Hart.

Protesters?

BLM and Antifa members are 'protesters' in the same sense in which Rodney King was a 'motorist,' Trayvon Martin was 'a child on the way to the candy store,' Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri was an 'unarmed teenager,' and Adolf Hitler was a 'statesman.'

What Black Lives Matter and Antifa are About

Matt Rowe (Headings added):

Black Lives Matter: Marxist to the Core

The three co-founders of BLM are Marxists to the core. According to the Capital Research Center, all three worked for front groups of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the largest radical Left organizations in the country. Opal Tometi actively promotes Socialism and anti-Western socio-economics, while Patrisse Khan-Cullors has publicly stated that the leaders of BLM are “trained Marxists.” Even so, it is highly likely that most active members and supporters of BLM are not Marxists at all, but simply believe they are fighting for social justice. The various chapters and voices of BLM don’t always share consistent goals, but what they have in common is a general anger toward the government and its most visible arm, the police.

Antifa: Culturally Marxist

In the United States, Antifa is an anarchist group of mostly young people dissatisfied with various political and economic issues. Like BLM, they have espoused a wide array of objectives across the country and through time. They nominally believe that the country is heading toward Fascism and tout the election of President Trump and his “America First” platform as an example of that. Their initial radical anti-globalism and anti-capitalist rhetoric in the 1980’s, however, only got them so far into the public’s awareness. In joining the anti-racist cause, they greatly legitimized their movement and expanded their opportunities for activism. Antifa is not shy about its Marxist roots either; they have merely modified the traditional conflict of workers versus the owners of capital to “identity conflicts” based upon race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like.

The cynical manipulation of "useful idiots" by people whose concern is not black lives but socialist revolution

The organizers who manipulate these groups are without a doubt dedicated to their Socialist movement. They are sustained by people who may or may not support—or even know—their true objectives. It doesn’t matter what the masses believe, as long as they can be worked into a frenzy as needed. The leaders don’t really care whether the police are targeting black Americans—it’s only important that their supporters believe it.

In essence, the vast majority of BLM and Antifa members, as well as vocal celebrities, college and high school activists, and, yes, Bishop Doherty, make up what are commonly known as the “useful idiots.” That is, they are propagandizing for a cause without really understanding the cause’s objectives. They are cynically used by shrewd leaders to achieve an end state that they may have never intended. This is especially dangerous as we get closer to our national elections. The goal is to keep these people blind to the truth for as long as possible, or better yet, to eventually indoctrinate them into the cause as true Socialists. They are evil, and they are doing exactly what Father Rothrock stated in his message.

The Priorities of Comrade Bozo de Blasio

Defunding: The Most Effective Weapon in Our Arsenal?

When it comes to resisting the depredations of the Left, the best tactic is defunding/divestment.

• It's easy: just refuse to give money to your alma mater, say. When their bean counters make an appeal you simply ignore it, or explain why you will not fund opposition to your values.
• It costs nothing. No check to write!
• It is vastly more effective than any verbal protest. Money, or the withholding thereof, gets people's attention. But go ahead and write another blog post or letter of protest if it makes you feel better.  It will be ignored by those who need to read it. 
• No one, apart from the parties affected, need know about your refusal to play the chump. No worries about getting doxxed or otherwise harassed.  But that ineffectual online protest you lodged could cost you your job.  People have been cashiered for a Facebook 'like.' I kid you not.

Did the Catholic Church Change its Doctrine on Usury?

A useful article on an intriguing topic. I take no position on its content, but merely note it for future reference, in keeping with my motto, "Study everything."

Did the Church’s change of teaching on usury constitute a doctrinal change? No. What changed was our understanding of the nature and function of money, neither of which has doctrinal status. Once the understanding of money changed, the sin of usury ceased to be identified in any simple way with charging interest on money. This is development, not substantial change.

Do You Value Your Health?

Then you must be a white supremacist.

This Unsinn is beneath refutation, but you ought to be aware of it.  It supplies further reasons to divest the so-called 'universities' and to never vote Democratic.

Half-Way Cultural Appropriation

You appropriate our science and technology, why not then appropriate the values, virtues, attitudes, and behaviors that led to the science and technology?  Here are some of them: hard work, self-control, self-knowledge, deferral of gratification, focus, protracted study, objectivity, rational thinking, coherent speech, respect for legitimate authorities, and so on.

Why the half-way cultural appropriation? Go all the way, and you will benefit yourself enormously.

There is nothing 'white' about the above values and virtues, attitudes and behaviors. After all, Asians implement them as well as Caucasians, if not better.   They are normatively universal and good for everyone.

'Liberals,' Graffiti, and Art

A 'liberal' is someone who has no problem with the defacing of public and private property with graffiti, which he considers 'art,' while holding that true art is 'racist.'

'Conservative' Andrew Sullivan Gets the Boot

The defenestration of Andrew Sullivan by New York Magazine shows once again that for the Left one cannot be too far left. This is rich:

The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

My best Sully post, which attracted some very good comments: The Left Eats its Own: Andrew Sullivan.

I stand with Sully despite his mindless anti-Trumpery which is so extreme that he will, horribile dictu, vote for Biden come November! Can a puppet be a weathervane? That's creepy, sleepy, lunchbox Joe, man of the people, coal miner, and good Catholic.

Free speech! Open inquiry! Down with the Left! Long live the Republic!

We conservatives are the new classical liberals. The times they are a'changin'.

Don't Give Money to Your Alma Mater!

With few exceptions, the universities of the land have become leftist seminaries. Why give ammo to the enemy?  Charlie Kirk makes the case for divestment in DivestU, a very short YouTube video.

Kirk explains his divestment initiative to Laura Ingraham in this two-and-a-half minute interview.

Red Bull 'Wokesters' Purged

Here:

Red Bull just reminded their ‘wokest’ employees who calls the shots in a total massacre of “social justice warrior” employees.

Not only were the top two North American executives fired, but so were entire marketing teams and “culture” teams that were dedicated to pushing the lie of systemic racism.

Red Bull has just shown the way forward for all who want to prevent a total Marxist-style takeover of business and government in America. There is no appeasing these people, the only way forward is to fire them as quickly as possible, and with no mercy. Err on the side of firing everyone, if need be.

What this country needs, at every level of society, academia, and government, is a total and complete purge of ‘woke’ revolutionaries, before the blood starts running in the streets.

A step in the right direction. To fire is better than to fire upon.

Democrat-Run Cities: The Case for Letting them Burn to the Ground

Marc Thiessen presents, without endorsing, the case for allowing the social experiment in lawlessness to proceed:

Trump declared that enough is enough and that he and Attorney General William P. Barr will soon unveil a plan to “to straighten things out.” But maybe he shouldn’t. The genius of our federal system is that states and localities serve as what the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called laboratories of democracy that can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Right now, many of America’s cities are conducting social experiments in lawlessness, showing the rest of the country what happens when local leaders join calls to “defund the police” and cower in the face of violence.

There is an argument for just letting those experiments play out. After all, we are told elections have consequences. Well, the people in those cities voted for weak Democratic mayors and city council members. Maybe if they experience the consequences of incompetent Democratic leadership, they’ll do what New Yorkers did in the 1990s and vote in tough-on-crime Republicans to restore law and order.

Or they can move. As Milton Friedman explained in “Capitalism and Freedom,” the beauty of our system of dispersed power is that, “if I do not like what my local community does … I can move to another local community. … If I do not like what my state does, I can move to another. [But] if I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.” In recent years, growing numbers of Americans quit high-tax blue states such as California for low-tax red states like Texas. If disastrous fiscal policies can spark this kind of migration, maybe disastrous policing policies will do the same.

Of course, the counterargument is: What about the people in Portland, Seattle and other cities where violence is out of hand who did not vote for feckless Democrats? Why should they be subjected to violence? Moreover, although wealthier residents may be able to pick up and leave, the poorer citizens of these cities who depend on social assistance and public housing don’t have the resources to do so. And what about small business owners who have poured their life savings into enterprises that have been looted and vandalized? If they pick up and leave, they lose everything.

It’s unfair to leave these Americans defenseless. And it’s arguably the president’s responsibility to do something about it.

When I consult my inner Black Shirt, I am inclined to favor a massive and merciless Federal crackdown on the enemies of civilization.  Criminals are emboldened when they get away with their crimes. Priceless artifacts of our cultural heritage are being destroyed before our eyes, and it will only get worse if the miscreants aren't stopped with whatever brutality is necessary.  But then I remind myself of the articles I have written favoring federalism. Let the fools in blue states and leftist-dominated cities run their social experiments!  Amendment X of the U. S. Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.

It's a nice little political aporia we've got going here. States rights? Or Big Daddy applying the rod of discipline to the likes of morons such as Lori 'I need a haircut'  Lightfoot (Chicago), Jenny 'Summer of Love' Durkan (Seattle), and Comrade Bozo de Blasio (New Dork City), to mention just three.

But in the end we must look to our own health, well-being, and virtue. The Founders understood that it is the virtue of the people that is the ultimate support of the Republic. What can an individual do? Speak out, if you can muster the civil courage to do so in the teeth of the vicious anti-free-speech cancel-cultural Left. Vote, but never for any Democrat. And don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party losertarian jokers. Defund or rather don't fund the Left, including the Roman Catholic Church and almost all universities. Vote with your feet and with your wallet. Lay in a righteous supply of tools of survival. Home-school your children. Build vast hard-copy libraries to keep high culture safe from the barbarians. Buy gold and that other precious metal, Pb.

Look to the future, both here below, and beyond time's horizon.  Hope for the best; prepare for the worst. Be of good cheer and keep yourself in shape in mind and body. Long live the Republic!

The Self-Reliant Don't Snivel

Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, Bantam, 1989, p. 180:

Times were often very rough for me but I can honestly say that I never felt abused or put-upon. I never felt, as some have, that I deserved special treatment from life, and I do not recall ever complaining that things were not better. Often I wished they were, and often found myself wishing for some sudden windfall that would enable me to stop wandering and working and settle down to simply writing. Yet it was necessary to be realistic. Nothing of the kind was likely to happen, and of course, nothing did.

I never found any money; I never won any prizes; I was never helped by anyone, aside from an occasional encouraging word – and those I valued. No fellowships or grants came my way, because I was not eligible for any and in no position to get anything of the sort. I never expected it to be easy.

It is very difficult these days to explain the classic American value of self-reliance to 'liberals,' especially that species thereof known as the 'snowflake.'   Not understanding it, they mock it, as if one were exhorting people to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, which, of course, is impossible.

Sometimes we need the help of others. When we do, we should not be ashamed to ask for it. The self-reliant, however, seek the help of others only after they have exhausted their own resources. 

I am slightly embarrassed to say something so obvious. But in these times of national melt-down, when the miasma of mass delusion overspreads the land, the obvious needs to be stated and repeated.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Carmelita, Juanita, and the Wicked Felina

Warren Zevon, Carmelita.  Stay clear of heroin and Pioneer chicken, both.

Flying Burrito Brothers, Juanita. Lyrics:

'No  affection' were the words that stuck on my mind
When she walked out on me for the very last time.
Oh mama sweet mama can you tell me what to say?
I don't know what I've done to be treated this way.

In a cold dirty room that's where I found myself
With a bottle of wine and some pills off the shelf.
Oh mama sweet mama can you tell me what to say?
I don't know what I've done and I'm feeling so ashamed.

Then an angel appeared she was just 17
In a dirty old gown (town?) with a conscience so clean
Oh mama sweet mama can you tell me what to say?
She's brought back the life that I once threw away.

Delightfully ambiguous:  Is Juanita the girl who walked out or the one who saved him?  Or both?

Marty Robbins, El Paso.  "Cradled by two loving arms that I'll die for/One little kiss and Felina, good-bye."

Bonus cut: Devil Woman

Christianity and Politics

The Christian who sees politics with worldly eyes must support Donald J. Trump. The Christian who doesn't must withdraw from the fight and turn the other cheek even if it means getting slaughtered, just as Jesus allowed himself to be slaughtered. But the apolitical Christians won't be slaughtered right away. They will first have to endure the destruction of Christian culture, a process that is proceeding apace right before our eyes.  Statues are being toppled, and churches destroyed, some of them ancient and of great historical significance. Ever hear of Junipero Serra and the San Gabriel Mission?  After they have demolished monuments and memorials and desecrated  churches,  destructive leftists will begin changing place names. Ever hear of a town called 'Santa Barbara'? I am just scratching the surface.  Fill in the details for yourself.  Is anything safe from the raging nihilists of the Left? Cemeteries? It's happening, and more is coming. Or are you in denial?

To Christians such as David French who oppose Trump, I pose a simple question:

What do you propose that we do politically to put a stop to this destruction of Christian and indeed Western, heritage and civilization?

I don't doubt the sincerity and good intentions of French, and Mona Charen, and any number of other Never Trumpers, but they clearly don't have a practical plan. Starting up yet another 'conservative' publication such The Bulwark is just more yap-and-scribble. The Democrats are now a hard-Left party and their 'leader,' that 'good Catholic' Joe Biden, is but a puppet.  (He is all in on abortion on demand and, horribile dictu,  he reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment!) Do the Never Trumpers  have an electable candidate to rival Trump? Not by a long shot.

So what is the plan ladies and gentlemen? Do you propose that we wait for  for the 'true conservative' to come along?  If he ever shows up it will be too late.  A practical man deals with the situation at hand as best he can with what he's got. He does not let the best become the enemy of the good. He does not seek perfection in an imperfect world. Trump is all we've got.  Show me I'm wrong.

I would guess that David and Mona and the other boys and girls of the yap-and-scribble brigade are not keen on hot civil war. But that could be in the cards: guns and ammo are flying off the shelves.  The patience of the people has an expiration date. A lot of us don't approve of the erasure of history and heritage by leftist scum.  And we don't cotton to the abdication of those to whom we entrust the preservation of civil order.

I grew up just a few miles from the 249-year-old San Gabriel Mission: