Maverick Philosopher

Truth and Accuracy

Their difference explained at Substack. 

Pride?

What are you proud of? Your paraphilias? Is that what your 'pride flag' signifies? Does the plus sign at the end of LGBTQ+ signify the inclusion of every paraphilia? Might that be taking 'inclusion' too far? Is every focus of erotic interest legitimate?  Should every mode of (what has traditionally been considered to be) deviant behavior be normalized? Should every factual abnormality be viewed as normative?  

Are you really proud of your pedophilia, pedovestism, coprophilia, necrophilia and anthropophagy? 

Here: 

The parade that capped off June’s Pride events in New York City proclaimed the movement’s actual intentions quite clearly. The message was chanted all along the route, repeatedly and at high volume:

“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”

Now, there’s a sentiment that should make your blood run cold. It gives the lie to all those innocent protestations you’ve heard for years: “Gee, all we want is to live our lives and love who we love.”

It’s well past time to wake up and recognize the truth. We are living in a very dangerous time filled with threats to our physical and mental health, and to our immortal souls.

The pedophilic words chanted by a corps of New York drag queens were as vivid a wake-up call as can be imagined. This was perversion on proud display. It was an assault on childhood innocence, on family life, on decency, on religion, on basic human reality. It was as vivid and unignorable as a declaration of war.

You might call it our “Gender Pearl Harbor.”

The time for kindness and tolerance has passed. These people must be opposed on every level in every way.

The problem, of course, is that the gender movement has secured alliances among the leadership of government, business, finance, media, the arts — virtually every institution of society. The country has been severely compromised by this pervasive and insidious gender ideology.

Wittgenstein and Dreaming

On Certainty #383: The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well  and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

I beg to differ. It is a plain fact that people have dreams in which they know that they are dreaming, and in which they think to themselves, 'I am now dreaming.' In those dreams they are not dreaming that they are dreaming, if dreaming that p entails that one does not know that p. For they they do  know that they are dreaming despite their being asleep and dreaming.  

And so Ludwig Wittgenstein in the above passage gives us no reason to dismiss the Cartesian dream argument for skepticism about the external world.

I once had an extremely vivid dream about my dead cat, Maya. There she was, as (apparently) real as can be. I saw her, I touched and petted her, I heard her. It was all astonishingly vivid and coherent. There was an ongoing perceiving in which visual, tactile, and auditory data were well-integrated. And yet I knew within the dream that she was dead, and I knew that I had buried her in April 2001 in the desert behind the house, and that coyotes had dug her up and had consumed her rotting corpse. 

And so I began to philosophize within the dream: I know that Maya is dead and that I am dreaming, and so these perceptions, as vivid and coherent as they are, cannot be veridical. Coherence is no guarantee of veridicality. Neither is their "force and vivacity" to borrow a phrase from Hume. I did not dream that I was dreaming, I knew that I was dreaming; and I did not dream the reasoning in the third-to-last sentence, I validly executed that reasoning. And the meanings of the terms in the reasoning were in no way affected by their being grasped within a dream.

Wittgenstein seems to be assuming that, for any proposition p, if one becomes aware that p while dreaming, then one has dreamt that p in a sense that entails that one does not know that p. But this assumption is false, as Descartes appreciated. Becoming aware that 2 + 3 = 5 while dreaming is consistent with knowing its truth in the way that dreaming that one is sitting before a fire, when one is lying in bed, is not consistent with knowing its truth.

So there is no reason to deny that one can become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming. To become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming is not to dream that one is dreaming in a sense that implies that one is not in reality dreaming. And to use words within a dream is not to dream the meanings of those words in a sense that implies that they do not in reality have those meanings.

My point, again, is that Wittgenstein in the above passage gives us no reason to dismiss the Cartesian dream argument for skepticism about the external world.

The Christian View of Death and Immortality

Substack latest.

Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti

From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me.  It reads well with 'weblog' substituted for 'notebook.'

The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.

Related: Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

Emmett Till

Top of the Stack. 

Emmett Till is back in the news. This being the case, the inevitable comparisons of Till with Trayvon Martin will start up again. My purpose is to provide you with some background so that you can appreciate just how inane the comparisons are that assimilate the defensible killing of Martin by George Zimmerman to the unspeakably brutal and unjust torture and slaying of Till. Anyone who assimilates the two is not exaggerating, but lying shamelessly.   To understand this one need only know the essentials of each case. 

The Professor-Student Non-Aggression Pact

Substack latest.

Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

Top o' the Stack

Toleration Misunderstood

"Toleration" is not a dirty word, contrary to what a growing number who misuse the term, seem to think. Now leftists are the kings of language-abuse, but conservatives are not immune to it either.  The current trend toward the misuse of 'toleration' needs to be vigorously opposed as I do in this latest Substack article.

Epicurus Redivivus

As in the case of Joe Biden and those who support him.

Conservative or Counter-Revolutionary?

Christopher Rufo made an excellent contribution to Mark Levin's "Life, Liberty, and Levin" last night. I will put one of his points in my own way with my own additions and 'flourishes.'

One can conserve only what one has, not what one has lost. We conservatives have lost control of our institutions including the universities, the schools, the churches, and the Fourth Estate. The Left's "long march through the institutions" has been successful thanks to their energy and our inattention. Since there is little or nothing left to conserve, we must take back what has been stolen. While we may continue to call ourselves conservatives, we must think of ourselves as counter-revolutionaries.  Counter-revolutionaries, not reactionaries. 'Reactionary Right' is a phrase to avoid. He who reacts is defined by that against which he reacts. We need action, not reaction. 

As for the 'post-liberals,' it is not clear what they are about.  But to the extent that they support a 'throne and altar' response to the Left's depredations, in the form, say, of integralism, then they are but another impotent form of reaction.

You may look away . . .

. . . but it won't make the madness go away. Still, "Out of sight, out of mind" is a way to peace of mind. But is such peace worth wanting if its price is ignorance of imminent threats to your life, liberty, and well-being? Can you afford to ignore the sheer suicidal insanity of the Left? Examples are legion.

Here is a recent one: Illinois law requires landlords to sell or rent to illegal aliens.

The Republic is on its last legs when law is used both to undermine the rule of law, and to punish productive citizens who accept the risk of buying properties, refurbishing them, and then putting them up for rent or sale. 

The Purpose of Kamala Harris

Actually, she has two.

The first is to make Joe Biden appear articulate by comparison. 

Her main purpose, though, is to insure that Biden not be removed from office.

The Underground Grammarian

If you think that I am a language Nazi, then pay a visit to the Underground Grammarian. His stern visage reminds me of a passage near the beginning of Franz Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz, "Before the Law." The protagonist seeks entry into the Law, but at the door stands a guard who warns:

Ich bin maechtig. Und ich bin nur der unterste Tuerhueter. Von Saal zu Saal stehn aber Tuerhueter, einer maechtiger als der andere. Schon den Anblick des dritten kann nicht einmal ich ertrage.

I am powerful. And I am but the least of the gatekeepers. From room to room there are gatekeepers each stronger than the next. Not even I can bear so much as the glance of the third. (tr. BV)

Related: Fellow Language Nazi William Sullivan reports on the case of Arizona Republican Eli Crane. Crane got into trouble with the 'woke' contingent when he inadvertently used 'colored people' instead  of 'people of color.'

A point Sullivan did not make, but I will, is that the two phrases, while synonymous in objective intension, are semantically distinct in subjective intension. They differ in connotation despite sameness in denotation.   

Requite Good with Evil?

Or with justice? And what is justice? 'Equity'?

Substack latest. The short piece ends thusly:

You absolutely must read old books to be in a position to assess justly the dreck and drivel pumped out by today's politically-correct quill drivers and so-called 'journalists' who wouldn't know a gerund from a participle if their colons depended on it.

Oriana Fallaci on Writing

From The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 23-24, emphases added:

I must say that writing is a very serious matter for me: it is not an amusement or an outlet or a relief. It is not, because I never forget that written words can do a lot of good but also a lot of evil, they can heal as much as kill. Read History and you'll see that behind every event of Good or Evil there is a piece of writing. A book, an article, a manifesto, a poem, a song. . . . So I never write rapidly, I never cast away: I am a slow writer, a cautious writer. I'm also an unappeasable writer: I do not resemble those who are always satisfied with their product as if they urinated ambrosia. Moreover I have many manias. I care for the rhythm of the phrase, for the cadence of the page, for the sound of the words: the metrics. And woe betide the assonances, the rhymes, the unwanted repetitions. For the form is important as much as the substance, the content. It is the recipient inside which the substance rests like wine inside a glass, like flour inside a jar, and managing such symbiosis at times blocks my work.

This is from a book in which Oriana speaks her mind on the events of 9/11. The passion of her ambrosial prose, the charm of her Italianate solecisms, kept me up last night. Move over Camille Paglia!

It Passes All the Same

No matter how many times you remind yourself to seize the day, to enjoy the moment, to do what you are doing, to be here now, to live thoughtfully and deliberately, to appreciate what you have; no matter how assiduous the attempts to freeze the flow, fix the flux, stay the surge to dissolution, and contain the dissipation wrought by time's diaspora and the mind's incontinence -- it passes all the same.

Are There Aptronymic Initials?

I should think so. Bernie Sanders' initials are 'B. S.'

The man is a destructive fool, though not as destructive or as foolish as Joey B.  Proof here.

It's a funny world. In the private sector it is often the very best who rise to the top; in politics, the very worst.  Is there anyone in the Biden  (mal)Administration who does not illustrate my point?

Morality and Legality: Three Principles

(show)

On my view morality and legality are both 'notionally distinct' and 'extensionally distinct.' Thus I maintain both that the concept or notion of a morally qualified action is distinct from the concept of a legally qualified action, and that there are instances of each concept that are not instances of the other. If the following three principles are defensible, then the notional and extensional distinction between morality and legality is defensible.

P1. Not everything morally impermissible should be legally impermissible.
P2. Not everything morally obligatory should be legally obligatory.
P3. Not everything morally permissible should be legally permissible.

Ad (P1). This could be put idiomatically by saying that not everything morally wrong should be illegal. I hope you will agree with me that drinking oneself into a stupor is morally wrong. It's a Friday night, you are alone, you stay in your house the entire time, but you down a quart of whiskey. I hope you will agree with me that this is morally wrong. (I could give an argument, but it belongs in a separate post.) Though morally wrong, such behavior should not be illegal. If you don't like my example, you are invited to concoct one of your liking that makes the same point.

Why should not everything morally wrong be illegal? The positive law is made by human beings and enforced by state power. But it is notorious that human beings are to varying degrees morally corrupt and that they are therefore strongly tempted to misuse any power that they acquire. Note that I do not say that power tends to corrupt its possessors, but that our antecedent corruption inclines us to the misuse of such power as we possess. (Lord Acton take note.) This misuse of power is especially clear in the case of the agents of the state. (Ever have a run-in with a cop, a sheriff, an IRS agent who overstepped the bounds of his legitimate authority?)

Given the egregious violations of individual liberty including mass murder that state agents have been known to commit, reasonable people support limited government. One way to limit government is to restrict its sanctions to behavior that impinges upon public welfare. Thus there needs to be laws against drunk driving. But laws against private drunkenness (as in my example above) tend to give too much power to the state, besides being unenforceable. Laws that are unenforced, however, tend to breed disrespect for law. Without widespread respect for the rule of law, all the laws in the world will not contribute to public well-being.

Laws should be few in number, rational in content, understandable by the average citizen, enforceable, and enforced with credible sanctions. So not everything morally wrong should be illegal. 

Ad (P2). If you morally must do (ought to do, are obligated to do, have a duty to do) X, should the positive law require it of you? I answer in the negative. Consider the philosophical/religious duty to worship no such 'false gods' as money, power, sexual pleasure, Lady Luck, but to worship or devote yourself only to worthy objects such as God, truth, justice, benevolence, and the like. I would argue that it is morally impermissible to worship any such thing as money, sex, etc. and morally obligatory to apportion your highest concern only to worthy objects such as truth and justice. But these views of mine, thought rationally defensible, can be opposed with a show of rationality by sincere people. A hedonist might sincerely and thoughtfully maintain that pleasure alone is the good and that there can be no grounded distinctions among pleasures, and that therefore the pursuit of sexual pleasure among consenting adults is a perfectly legitimate and morally permissible object of pursuit. I would consider it better if people devoted themselves to truth over sexual pleasure, but the abuses that would result from using state power to enforce that view of mine would be worse than the positive outcomes would be good.

For a second example, consider the moral obligation to maintain one's physical health by the usual measures including good diet and vigorous exercise. If you value individual liberty and understand what I wrote above, you will not want laws that mandate these measures. (By the way, this is why 'universal health care,' i.e., government control of the delivery of health services ought to be opposed: a government that controls health care will be in a position to demand 'appropriate' behaviors from people including not engaging in activities deemed risky.)

Ad (P3). If an act is morally permissible, should it also be legally permissible? No. Surely there are circumstances in which running a red light is morally permissible. Suppose at three in the morning you slowly and cautiously coast through a red light at a deserted intersection in the proverbial 'middle of nowhere.' Surely that is morally permissible. Yet it ought not be legally allowed: a well-crafted law cannot have a clause that reads, "A motorist shall not run a red light except when it is safe to do so."

For a second example consider that is it morally permissible for some 15- year-olds to drive. But it ought not be legally permissible for 15-year-olds to drive. The same goes for voting. There are 15-year-olds more mature than some 50-year-olds and more fit to cast a vote. Yet it ought not be legal for 15 -year-olds to vote. Finally, it seems obvious that some marijuana use by some people in some circumstances is morally permissible, but it scarcely follows that marijuana use ought to be legalized. What is harmless for some will be dangerous for many. Laws crafted for the common good cannot take into account individual differences.

Victor Davis Hanson on Tribalism

Top o' the Stack

Victor Davis Hanson on Barack Obama

In less than eight minutes.

To Write Well, Read Well

The example of William James.  Excerpt:

But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct or ‘woke’ ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.

As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial interweaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.

Age Quod Agis: Agent and Awareness

Too much attention is wasted on what we did do and what we will do, and not enough on what we are doing. Age quod agis. "Do what you are doing."  A excellent maxim. A non-philosopher will take it as such and then move on. The philosopher lingers and goes deeper.

Verbally a tautology, the admonition expresses a non-tautological truth: attend to what you are doing.  I cannot fail to do what I am doing, but I can fail to attend to what I am doing. The admonition is in the same logical boat with "Be here now!" and "Live in the present!"

How could I fail to be here now? Where else would I be? And when else would I be? But that would be to miss the point. The tautological form of words expresses a non-tautological thought: Attend to the moment and be aware of your situation.

For a human being, to be is not merely to exist as a thing among things, but to be aware. The Being of a human being involves an element of material facticity -- you are this indigent material thing right here -- but also an element of transcendence in that, as aware, you are way beyond the miserable chunk of matter your awareness inhabits. You are way beyond it by being aware of the not-self. The not-self includes not only everything other than your body, but also your body inasmuch as your body and its parts are objects of awareness and thus not identical to you as subject of awareness. You are not merely a thing in the world, but also, as the subject of awareness,  a being  for whom there is a world.

As for living in the present, this is not a mere biological living. As a bit of nature's fauna, how could you biologically live other in the temporal present? To live in the present, as per the admonition, is to attend to the present, to impede the outward scatter of your thoughts, to bend back the outward intentionality (object-directedness) of mind to the present moment and its contents. You draw in your thoughts from the diaspora of the past and the future and the elsewhere in space and the elsewhere in general and bring them home. You could call it 'bringing it all back home.'  You could call it spiritual intro-version, or swimming upstream to the Source of thought's river. ("Man is a stream whose source is hidden" (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

The Being of the human being is a living, but not a merely biological living, not a mere living as understood by the objectifying natural science of biology. The ineluctable subjectivity ingredient in the Being of human beings cannot be understood from the point of view of biology.

Consider now the sentence 'I am hungry' asserted by BV.  It is true now at 12:45 PM.  What is it about? It is about BV, a publicly identifiable person. What does it predicate of BV? It predicates the property of being hungry. The predicational tie is signified by the copula 'am.' Does this copula express merely the object BV's instantiation of the property? No, it also expresses the speaker's awareness that he himself is hungry. Property-possession in a human being is more than a merely objective relation. This fact complements the earlier one about the ineluctable subjectivity of the Being of human beings. Both the Being and the Being-propertied of human beings is unlike anything else in the world.

Political Action

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

The French saying is attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."  The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.

Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark alliteration:  Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.

Read more at Substack.

The Destructive Bergoglio

At a time when we need our most venerable institutions to stand as bulwarks against the rising tide of wokery, what we find instead is capitulation.  When the head of the ancient Roman church abdicates, we are surely in for it. Corruptio optimi pessima.

Cardinal Pell vents his righteous fury at the Vatican's theological direction here.

What explains the stampede toward wokery? One causal factor is groupthink.

Horribile dictu: the Girl Scouts have joined the mad rush, offering a merit badge for LGBTQ+ awareness. 

'Wokeassery,' a coinage of mine, is another word for wokery, a word to be found in reputable dictionaries. It brings in the donkey theme, the jackass being the symbol of the Dementocrats.

Related: Heather Mac Donald on cultural survival and the Left's new default setting. Brilliant and deep analysis. But again just more analysis with nary a concrete suggestion as to what to do to restore sanity.

UPDATE (7/13)

Rod Dreher on Bergoglio's consolidation of his 'progressive' revolution.

Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth

From a December, 1985 journal entry.

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

Why does Søren Kierkegaard maintain that truth is subjectivity, and in the Danish equivalents of those very words? What could he mean by such a strange assertion?

To rehearse the obvious: S. K. does not mean that truth is subjective or relative, varying with persons, places, times, perspectives, or any other index. The Dane presupposes that truth is objective. But then what could the central claim of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "truth is subjectivity," mean?

Since Kierkegaard assumes the objective truth of Christianity, and does so without question or caveat, the only issue for him is the subjective appropriation of Christian truth. To appropriate is to make one's own, and the one in question is not the abstract one in general, but in every case the concrete existing individual. S. K.'s greatness is his honesty in expounding the demands that genuine Christianity makes on the would-be Christian and in exposing the state-sponsored Christianity Inc. of his day. Given the tacit presupposition of Christianity's truth, it makes sense for S. K. to say that truth is subjectivity. For it is not the objective truth of Christianity that is an issue for him, but the individual, and thus necessarily subjective, task of becoming a Christian. That is my charitable reading of the famous dictum.

But to be precise in our use of terms, truth is by its very nature objective, not subjective; what is subjective is truthfulness. Only a person can correctly be said to be truthful in the primary sense of the term. It would make no sense to describe propositions as truthful any more than it would make sense to say that persons have truth-values or stand in entailment relations or correspond to reality.

Objective truth and subjective truthfulness, though distinct,  are related. (It is worth noting that 'objective and 'subjective' in the immediately preceding sentence are redundant qualifiers: truth would not be what it is if it were not objective, and truthfulness would not be what it is if if were not a personal attribute.) They are related in that one can be truthful only by respecting the truth, by living in accordance with it, by refraining from lying, deceit, and deception, by telling the truth.

Subjective, lived, existential truth is entirely vacuous if disengaged from objective truth; at the limit subjective truth thus disengaged is indistinguishable from vicious self-will. It then becomes what in contemporary parlance is called 'my truth.' But there is no such thing as my truth; truth by its very nature is objective. What is mine can only be my appropriation or non-appropriation of the truth, truth that cannot be mine. One cannot appropriate and live the truth unless there is truth to be appropriated.

I said that truth and truthfulness are related. But I don't want to give the impression that while truthfulness requires truth, truth can subsist without truthfulness. That may be, but it is not obvious and may be reasonably controverted. So I now take a further step by stating that truth and truthfulness are mutually implicative. They are, if you will,  'dialectically related:' no one without the other, and no other without the one. It is clear that truthfulness implies truth; less clear, but arguable is that truth implies truthfulness. That is to say: there cannot be objective truth without subjectivity, without a truthful subject.  Can I prove it? No. But I can make a case for it, a case that renders the thesis reasonable to believe.

Truth is made for the mind at least in this sense: Objective truth is necessarily such that is it possibly recognized by someone. Truth mediates between mind and reality.  Truth is the truth of reality in both the objective and subjective senses of the genitive. Truth is about reality, but it is also reality's truth. Reality's truth is reality's intelligibility, its aptness to be understood. So if it is objectively true that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, then that truth, that true proposition, is necessarily such that it is possibly recognized or known by someone.  But it cannot be possibly known unless there actually exists someone who can know it. Now what is really possible must be grounded in the abilities and powers of actual agents. But there are many truths that are not possibly known by any finite agent. And yet they too are possibly known because knowability is an essential property of every truth. Therefore, their knowability is grounded in the actual power to know of an actual being. "And this all men call God."

Now that was rather quick, wasn't it? But I meant it merely as a sketch for an argument to be laid out rigorously. (The modal moves I made invite close scrutiny.) So laid out, the argument still won't be rationally compelling, but then no substantive argument in philosophy or theology for that matter is rationally compelling.  But many such arguments do supply grounds for reasoned belief which all that is available to us here below.

So suppose God exists. He is the truthful subjective source of all objective truth. In God, truthfulness and truth are one, the subjective and the objective coalesce. The mutually implicative relation of truthfulness and truth is as tightly grounded as could be. This is exactly what we should expect give the divine simplicity for which there many arguments. 

To sum up. Truthfulness for us here below is a matter of the subjective appropriation of objective truth. Read in this sense, S. K. 's dictum is defensible. It is not truth that is subjective, but truthfulness. 

There is no truthfulness without truth. This is well-nigh evident if not self-evident. That there is no truth without truthfulness is less clear but arguable as above.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Summer

Some of them, just a few, in keeping with my Summer Slowdown of '23. More later.

Lovin' Spoonful, Summer in the City, 1966, with period-appropriate video.

Joe Cocker cover.

Johnny Rivers, Summer Rain

Bob Dylan, Summer Days

Eddie Cochran, Summertime Blues, 1959

Voluntary Segregation

Substack latest.

Related: The Answer is Division. 

Summer Slowdown

"Blogging will be light," as we used to say in the early days of the blogosphere. I have a couple of books I need to finish and some practical business to attend to. But this won't be a total unplug as in earlier years. I plan to blog on both here and at Substack, but at a more leisurely pace.

Enjoy your summer!

Krauthammer's Fundamental Law Repealed

Substack latest

James Soriano at The American Thinker

His latest on Ukraine is America's 'Revolutionary Moment.'

What follows is his response to the comments made here on his earlier article Do Not Underestimate Russia's Resolve:

I just read through the comments this weekend.  There certainly was a spirited debate.  

The comments divide into two kinds, with Michael Brazier and Dimitri raising points about how I’ve mis-measured Russia’s intent and its imperialistic history.  Dimitri seemed to be somewhat surprised that a retired Foreign Service Officer wasn’t better informed about Russian history.  Since when is the State Department required to have a firm grasp of history?  That principle has never applied to it in the past and I see no reason why I should conform to it now.  Ha! 

Ben made very good points pushing back against the Russia bogey.   His comment about Churchill and Roosevelt approving the inflow of Russian power into Eastern Europe is noteworthy.  That fact is typically ignored when an anti-Russia speaker talks about how the Soviet bloc was really a modern replication of the Russian Empire.  It is as though Russia was the only actor on the scene and Eastern Europe was merely putty in its hands.  But events were shaped by other actors as well, especially the Anglo-Americans who agreed to Russia’s westward advance (although they may not have liked it), as well as local Communist parties which looked to Moscow for support. 

The other kind of comments were about the realist/idealist schools of foreign policy, with Russia playing Aristotle to America’s Plato.  Elliott picked up on it and you seconded.  

 

Oz linked to a NYT article on why the most prominent anti-war voices seem to be on the right.  That may be so, but I think the real story is the bipartisan consensus for fighting undeclared war against Russia.  Fair to say that US assistance to the Ukrainian army has killed more Russian soldiers than the Ukrainian army acting alone.  Many a “conservative” voice can be heard on the U.S. war wagon.  I’m sure you know the story about Lindsey Graham who approvingly told Zelensky recently that “Russians are dying” and that US support for Ukraine was the “best money we’ve ever spent”.  Shame on him.

Joe Odegaard made a good point about Russia fighting to fend off the imperial reach of the West’s Woke agenda.  That story’s out there in the blogosphere in various forms.  It’s a two-part story:  there’s the U.S. push for globalizing Woke, which R.R. Reno wrote about recently at First Things, and then there’s the resentment against it in the patriarchal and traditional societies of the so-called “Global South.”  I think that’s one reason the Global South has not signed up to sanction Russia.  It likes the idea of having a strong Russia and China around to curb American excesses.

France's Agony

Rod Dreher reports on the ravages of the allowance of the mass immigration of unassimilable elements. Will we learn? Little chance of that. Dreher concludes:

I feel strongly that one reason so many of us in the West — including many conservatives — cannot bring ourselves to deal with realities like those posed by mass migration is because the things we would have to face in order to deal effectively with the situation make us sick, or at the very least confused. We thought the world was one way, but it’s not. There is a direct line between the hubristic, cruel, catastrophic US invasion of Iraq to make it a liberal democratic bastion, and the disaster France (and Europe more broadly) has brought onto itself, and continues to bring onto itself, through mass migration, coupled with a woke elite that detests their own civilization.

UPDATE (7/2): 'Migrants' destroy French public library. But it's only property damage. No big deal, right? A guy I know raised the question whether our Christian values have made us unfit to survive in a world of savages aided and abetted by 'woke' leftist globalists.  Are the decadent French getting what they deserve?  But we are right behind them, just a little less decadent.

Galen Strawson on Zombies

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