Maverick Philosopher

How Civil Wars End

Another fascinating article. But who has time for all this reading?

"Forever reading, never read." 

Wer schreibt, der bleibt. He who writes, remains. 

The Roots of STEM Excellence

An important WSJ article by Charles Murray. 

I wish Murray were more direct and less worried about being called a racist and a white supremacist. An excess of prudence and a deficit of courage? It is interesting how these two cardinal virtues pull in opposite directions. 

Related: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race

Tulsi versus Kamala

Here and here

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Water High, Wide, Dirty, Troubled, Moody

Bob Dylan, High Water.  This is a late-career Dylan gem from Love and Theft (2001). A tribute to Charley Patton.  Demonstrates Dylan's mastery of the arcana of Americana. Our greatest and deepest singer-songwriter. 

My favorite verse:

Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.

Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when it's not dark yet, but getting there.

Charley Patton, High Water Everywhere.  Nice slide show.

The Band, Up on Cripple Creek

Jimi Hendrix, May This Be Love.  Waterfall. I had forgotten the wonderful guitar solo.

Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide.  I listened to a lot of Bonoff in the early '80s.  She does a great job with this traditional song.

Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Banks of the Ohio.  Joan Baez's version from an obscure 1959 album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Similar theme though not water-related: Doc Watson, Tom Dooley.  Doc and family in a BBC clip.

Standells, Dirty Water.  Boston and the River Charles. My mecca in the '70s, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, etc.  A great town to be young in.  But when it comes time to own property and pay taxes, then a right-thinking man high tails it for the West.

Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge over Troubled Water.  A beautiful song.  

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  Here is another version of the tune, from "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with some beautiful images.

Doc Watson, Moody River.  A moodier version than the Pat Boone hit which was based on the Chase Webster effort.

Clever YouTube comment: "It might be a little early in the day for an Am7."  But this here's Saturday night and I'm working on my second wine spodiodi. (Now you know where the Electric Flag  version came from.) Chords minor and melancholy go good 'long about now. 

My favorite verse:

Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.

Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when it's not dark yet, but getting there.

Charley Patton, High Water Everywhere.  Nice slide show.

The Band, Up on Cripple Creek

Jimi Hendrix, May This Be Love.  Waterfall. I had forgotten the wonderful guitar solo.

Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide.  I listened to a lot of Bonoff in the early '80s.  She does a great job with this traditional song.

Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Banks of the Ohio.  Joan Baez's version from an obscure 1959 album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Similar theme though not water-related: Doc Watson, Tom Dooley.  Doc and family in a BBC clip.

Standells, Dirty Water.  Boston and the River Charles. My mecca in the '70s, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, etc.  A great town to be young in.  But when it comes time to own property and pay taxes, then a right-thinking man high tails it for the West.

Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge over Troubled Water.  A beautiful song.  

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  Here is another version of the tune, from "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with some beautiful images.

Doc Watson, Moody River.  A moodier version than the Pat Boone hit which was based on the Chase Webster effort.

Clever YouTube comment: "It might be a little early in the day for an Am7."  But this here's Saturday night and I'm working on my second wine spodiodi. (Now you know where the Electric Flag  version came from.) Chords minor and melancholy go good 'long about now. 

Enlisting William S. Burroughs in the War Against Leftist Language-Abusers

I've been fulminating for over 20 years online against the language-abuse of  the language-abusing Left, having found it necessary on only a few occasions to take conservatives to task. Although my Beat credentials are impeccable,  I never took William Seward Burroughs seriously enough to suppose he could be enlisted on our side.  And then I stumbled upon this  article:

The modern left is unabashed about wielding language as a virus—or, really, as a form of control. “Supercut” videos by critics of corporate leftist media, like Tom Eliot, reveal the media figures and politicians repeating the same words and slogans over and over again: President Joe Biden, despite drooling on himself, is “sharp.” Kamala Harris has brought the “Joy, joy, joy” back into politics. Conservatives are “weird.” Abortion is “healthcare.” These word storms rip through the country via television, radio, and social media, infecting hosts from D.C. to California. Millions of people mindlessly repeat them as if they have been infected with some kind of mentally impairing disease. It’s a virus worse than COVID.

I agree with that completely. I am rather less enthusiastic about the following:

So how to fight the language virus? According to Burroughs, language can also be used to liberate. He believed that if words were cut into pieces and rearranged, you could break free from what he called the Control. Burroughs used rearranged texts, “found sound,” and tape-splicing—techniques still used by artists today—to defy the establishment. Burroughs used the method of cutting up sentences and rearranging them in famous countercultural books like Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. 

My generation took a more direct approach to using language to dismantle Control: punk rock. Not for nothing was Burroughs known as “the Godfather of Punk.” The writer was lionized by people like Lou Reed, David Bowie, and bands like U2, Nirvana, Joy Division, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. In his book American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Beat Generation, Jonah Raskin describes meeting Burroughs in San Francisco in the 1970s.

I will leave it for you to decide whether the way to combat the leftist language virus is via Old Bull Lee and punk rock.

Of the Beat triumvirate, "sweet gone Jack," alone moves me, supreme screw-up that he was, and surely no role model.  

One month to go, and then then it is October, Kerouac month in my literary liturgy. 

Are You Investing in Precious Metals?

“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten.”

Federal Judge Kozinski, Silveira v. Lockyer

Finally! A Cure for TDS

Check with your doctor to see if Independence is right for you.

Seriously, though, is TDS really a psychiatric condition, a form of topical insanity? Or is it rather a form of willful self-enstupidation? If the latter, then it is a grave moral defect, a form of vincible ignorance, and morally censurable as such.  

To put it crudely, TDS-ers are either sick in the head or else moral scum. Pick one.

Related: Michael Savage on liberalism as a mental disorder. I prefer the phrase, 'progressive disease.'

The Treason of the Clerics

Rod Dreher:

It’s a hell of a thing to realize that the leader of the one institution responsible more than any other for creating Western civilization — the Roman Catholic Church — is now actively working to dismantle that very civilization by opening the city gates, so to speak, wide to the invaders.

What do you even do with that if you are a Christian, Catholic or otherwise? German Reader is right. Do these sentimental clerics really think that life will go well for European Christians once the descendants of these migrants take power? How is life going for Christians in the Muslim world, eh? And even if they were to be religiously tolerant, there is still the matter of the erasure of distinct European cultures. The Great Replacement. And for what?

In the Teeth of Increasing Polarization . . .

. . . Should We Discuss Our Differences?

Pessimism versus optimism about disagreement.  

Our national life is becoming like philosophy: a scene of endless disagreement about almost everything. The difference, of course, is that philosophical controversy is typically conducted in a gentlemanly fashion without bloodshed or property damage. Some say that philosophy is a blood sport, but no blood is ever shed, and although philosophers are ever shooting down one another's arguments, gunfire at philosophical meetings is so far nonexistent.  A bit of poker brandishing is about as far as it gets.

Some say we need more 'conversations' with  our political opponents about the hot-button issues that divide us.  The older I get the more pessimistic I become about the prospects of such 'conversations.'  I believe we need fewer conversations, less interaction, and the political equivalent of divorce. Here (from a site no longer online) is an extremely pessimistic view:

A Test for the Religious Sensibility

You have it if these two books speak to you.

Substack latest. 

With a bit of discussion of a recent book by Peter Kreeft on Augustine.

About Whataboutism

A quick take of mine.

Why it works internationally.

Political Aesthetics: Oprah versus Hulk

Christopher Rufo is always good. 

Mysticism with Monica

Top o' the Stack.

Defensive Gun Use Without a Shot Fired

Texas man defends family from machete-wielding home invader with his 9mm semi-auto.

A quartet of questions.

How would you repel a home invasion?

Would you vote for a political party they leaders of which intend to violate your right to self-defense?

Would you lay money on the proposition that the miscreant depicted in the article is an illegal alien?

Is it wise to vote for a party that stands for open borders?

Related:  An Abuse of Language: 'Gun Buy-Back'

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, O Fortuna (With Latin and English).  Better performance without lyrics.

Joan Baez, There But For Fortune.  The best rendition of a song written by Phil Ochs. Watch the short video.  Ochs' version.

I agree with this analysis of Ochs:

The short, triumphant, tragic career of Phil Ochs illustrates one of the harder lessons of American popular culture: that audiences are moved far more by mystery than by commitment. Of all the artists of the 1960s folk-music boom, only Bob Dylan understood that in his bones, and only Dylan became a superstar. Ochs, by contrast, was the bright class president of the Greenwich Village scene, reeling off powerful, didactic protest songs in an earnest tenor. He was direct and defiantly uncool, and it doomed him.

Joan Baez, A Simple Twist of Fate

Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust. Dylan wouldn't have made it without her.

Slouching Toward Totalitarianism

Can Trump save us?

Klingenstein: Is our regime totalitarian, emerging or otherwise? What makes it so? How far along are we? Can we fight back?

Ellmers: I think the essay that Ted Richards and I wrote for your website, and the several excellent responses that you published, cover this pretty well. 

Klingenstein: How much can Trump fix it?

Ellmers: Very hard to say. Showing up, as they say, is half the battle. Or, as you have noted, the first step in winning a war is to know that you are in one. Trump knows this. He has to keep making the case to the American people that they are true sovereigns, and the arrogant ruling class is illegitimate. The outrageous incompetence of the Secret Service, which failed to prevent the attempted assassination of President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, is a good way to remind people that our so-called experts have no expertise. These bureaucrats are mostly blowhards, grifters, and phonies. 

I agree with Trump’s decision not to talk any more about how he was almost murdered, but incoming Vice President Vance should… a lot. In fact, I hope that Trump will continue to do what he does best as president — using his wit and populist rhetoric and negotiating skills to good effect — while the vice president’s office acts as the day-to-day juggernaut that ruthlessly dismantles the administrative state. 

Klingenstein: Will Trump win? What does it depend on? If you were his political consultant, what would you advise him to do?

Ellmers: I think he will win by a significant margin — too big, as people are saying, for the Democrats to steal. My friend Jim Piereson, writing in The New Criterion, has predicted that Trump will win the popular vote by six points, take all the swing states, and get 339 electoral votes. That sounds right to me. 

He seems to have been changed somewhat since he nearly took a bullet to the head. I would encourage him to remain upbeat and positive. 

Klingenstein: What will happen after Trump if he is elected in 2024?

Ellmers: Again, hard to say. Of course the Left will launch its resistance campaign, but I don’t think anyone knows how much support it will have outside the radical fringe. Some of my friends think I’m too optimistic, but I suspect that some energy and panache has gone out of protesting and rioting since the 2020 Summer of Left-wing Love. There will still be violence by Antifa and others, but I don’t think it will have the same mainstream support. And we should not discount the anger the hard Left will direct at the Democrat party. The media and the Beltway establishment really screwed up this election by lying about Biden, and I think the radicals will not take kindly to having their agenda thwarted by the complacency and arrogance of the Democrat’s leadership. 

Klingenstein: Is Vance MAGA? Is he the right choice for VP? He abhorred Trump before he lauded him. Does this make you hesitate?

Ellmers: It’s extremely important that Trump 1) went outside the decrepit establishment and picked someone who will help him fight the Beltway blob head-on; and 2) picked someone young and energetic who can carry on the MAGA agenda. That means Trump is thinking long-term. It was a good choice. 

Having just finished Hillbilly Elegy, I would say that Trump's VP pick was an outstanding choice, the best he could have made from the outstanding candidates on his short list.  A second brilliant move was his welcoming of RFK Jr. into his coalition. Here is the Kennedy clan's black (red?) sheep's Arizona Trump endorsement. 

Philosophy and Christianity

Substack latest

Ruminations on Ratzinger 

The Ever-Increasing Frenzy, Tension, and Explosiveness of this Country

Try to guess when the following was written, and by whom.  Answer below the fold:

Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving.  So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U. S. Catholic about the war article. -- some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question -- can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates?  Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence.  It is preferable to the uncertainty of 'waiting.' 

 

Try to guess when the following was written, and by whom.  Answer below the fold:

Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving.  So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U. S. Catholic about the war article. -- some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question -- can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates?  Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence.  It is preferable to the uncertainty of 'waiting.' 

 

Franz Brentano, The Teaching of Jesus and its Enduring Significance

An old book recently translated. Reviewed here.

Comrade Kamala's Dangerous Policies

Stealth ideologue that she is, she won't tell you what her policies are. You can either elect her to find out, or go here for a preview.

No Church for Old Men?

Good news, if true:

The American Catholic Church is seeing a prolonged surge of conservative young priests, leaving the aging and far more liberal Vatican II generation with no replacements.

According to a nationally representative survey conducted by the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America, of 3,500 priests ordained since 2020, “More than 80 percent of priests ordained since 2020 describe themselves as theologically ‘conservative/orthodox’ or ‘very conservative/orthodox.'” Foreign-born priests in the United States, a significant contingent due to the overall low number of ordinations in the U.S., were found to be significantly more liberal than their American counterparts.

However, perhaps most revealing, the study found that no priest ordained since 2020 described himself as “very progressive.” In addition, nearly all priests ordained in 2020 and afterward described themselves as politically moderate or conservative.

Is the fumigation of the RCC finally upon us? As I recall my pal Catacomb Joe saying back in the day, fumus sanctus!

An RCC that degenerates into just another piece of leftist cultural junk needs to be defunded and ignored.

Trotsky's (Misplaced) Faith in Man

On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own.

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe, a mountaineering implement far more deadly than an ice pick when used as a weapon.   Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

Read the rest over at my Substack site.

Among those who guarded Trotsky in exile was a fascinating character in his own right, Jean van Heijenoort. I have two Substack entries about him: Thomas Merton and Jean van Hejenoort: A Tale of Two Idealists and Like a Moth to the Flame: A Sermon of Sorts on Romantic Folly.  The latter begins:

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

In these days when Comrade Kamala threatens to preside over a once-great nation, I offer a salutary reflection on the horrors of communism with the help of Lev Kopelev. It begins:

While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):

Finally, a question for Tony Flood, one-time card-carrying member of the CPUSA, who knows more about communism than I ever will.  Trotsky says somewhere something along the lines of: You may attempt to distance yourself from politics, but politics won't distance itself from you.  What exactly did he say? And where did he say it?

I fear that old Trotsky is right, which is why we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable must fight, Fight, FIGHT!

No Takers Without Makers

Substack latest. With a poke at the woke joke, Tim Walz, Comrade Kamala's running mate.

Related: Makers and Takers: "You Didn't Build That!" Revisited

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Pattie Boyd as Muse

A musician needs a muse.  George Harrison and Eric Clapton found her in Pattie Boyd.  Here are five of the best known songs that she is said to have inspired.  If you don't love at least four of these five, you need a major soul adjustment. Frank Sinatra famously said of George Harrison's "Something" that it "was the best love song ever written." He ought to know.

Something

Isn't it a Pity

Wonderful Tonight

Layla  (The best part starts at 3:13 the poignancy of which still rends my soul the way it did 54 years ago)

Bell Bottom Blues  ("If I could choose a place to die, it would be in your arms . . . .")

Once More on Whether Existence Could be a Property

This just over the transom from Samuli Isotalo:

 

I recently started reading your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence and the following kind of argument against the view that existence is a first-level property came to my mind. Probably you and many others have considered something like this, but I send it anyway.

 

Suppose existence is a first-level property and to exist is to instantiate this property. Now, given that some substance a instantiates some property P, we most likely want to say that this property P itself also exists. Thus, given that some substance exists, we want to say that the property, existence, it instantiates, also exists. But if to exist is to instantiate a property, existence, then it seems that in order for this property to exist, it needs to instantiate a further property, existence₂. But then we also want to say that this property, existence₂, exists, therefore it needs its own property, existence₃, and so on ad infinitum.

 

You make three points.

 

The first is that, if existence is a first-level property, a property of concrete individuals or substances, and if the existing of substance a is its instantiating of this property, then the first-level property of existence must itself exist. I agree.  For if existence did not itself exist, then neither a nor any concrete individual would exist.  This holds no matter to which category we assign existence.  No matter what existence itself is, were it not to exist, nothing would exist. But if you read me carefully, you will see that I resolutely deny that existence is a property (where properties are defined in terms of instantiation) of anything, whether individuals, properties, concepts, linguistic  expressions, worlds, . . . whatever.

 

Your second point is that if existence is a property of individuals, and existence itself exists, then there has to be a second property, existence_2, in virtue of whose instantiation existence₁ exists.  But this doesn't follow. For it may be that existence is a self-instantiating property, roughly in the way a Platonic Form is self-exemplifying.  (But we needn't digress into a discussion of Plato, his Forms (eide), participation (methexis) in Forms, the Third Man Regress, etc.)

 

Consider the property of being concrete. Is it itself concrete? No, it is abstract. Now consider the property of being abstract. Is it itself abstract? Yes. Therefore, the property of being abstract is self-instantiating. (Notice: I did not say self-exemplifying. A property is not an exemplar.). The same holds for other putative properties: self-identity is self-identical, causal inertness is causally inert, omnitemporality is omnitemporal. 

 

So why can't existence be self-instantiating? I am not saying that it is, but if it is, then, to your third point,  the infinite regress cannot get started. Note also that if properties are necessary beings, as many philosophers maintain, and if existence is a property of individuals, then too the infinite regress could not arise.

 

Thus, treating existence as a first level property leads to an infinite regress. Existence seems to always pass on to some further property, like a slippery piece of soap that one cannot catch. What if we say that the property existence itself just exists, without it instantiating any further property? Then it seems that we have arrived at a picture very much like the one you are endorsing, namely, existence itself as Paradigm. For then we have this one property existence, which alone exists without it pointing to anything further, and every other thing exists in relation to it, by participating in it or instantiating it. But then it seems that to call such a thing ‘property’ is misleading, for properties are ontologically posterior to substances. Now, this reminds a lot of Aquinas, when he says, e.g. in De Ente et Essentia that existence itself is to be understood as something absolute and every other thing as participating in it.

What you are missing is that I deny that existence is a property. So your criticisms do not touch my view. What I conclude, after  a complicated argument that I cannot here summarize, is that existence is more like a paradigmatic individual. It is not a predicable entity. It is more like the opposite of a predicable entity. It is not a property of individuals, properties, or anything else. As I said above, self-existent Existence, as that in virtue of which everything else exists, resembles a Platonic paradigm. You are right to catch the similarity to Aquinas, although my argumentation is wholly non-Thomistic. It is unlike any of his Five Ways. This because it it not based on an Aristotelian substance ontology, but on a fact ontology deriving from Gustav Bergmann and D. M. Armstrong.

The Case Against Investing in Cryptocurrencies

Here

Israel: Leader of the Free World

For eight decades after the end of World War II, America’s proudest title was “Leader of the Free World.” Today, both on grounds of practical leadership and grasp of what it means to be free, we are yielding the title to Israel.

George Gilder makes the case, and a strong case it is.

David French Off his Rocker: He Will Vote Harris-Walz

Was this pseudo-con ever on it? See here for a meaty extract from his most recent NYT column. 

The rejoinder by NT scholar Robert Gagnon is good.

I define my position over against that of French in my hard-hitting Substack entry, David French, Christianity, and Politics.

The Left's Verbal Theft

A Substack warning to foolish conservatives.

The Reichstag Fire and the January 6th 'Insurrection'

How close is the analogy? And what could the analogy be taken to show?

Is there an historian in the house?

The Integrationist Fantasy

E pluribus unum? Out of many, one? It can work, and it did work for a time, although not perfectly. But no longer. Whether a One can be made of Many  depends on the nature of the Many. 

A viable One cannot be made out of just any Many. 

To think otherwise is to succumb to what I call the Integrationist Fantasy.  This is the dangerous conceit that people can be brought together peacefully and productively despite deep differences in their languages, religions, cultures, traditions, and values.

To integrate is to bring together into a whole.  But a functioning whole, whether political, social, or of any sort, cannot be assembled from any old assortment of parts. In terms of an outworn metaphor from yesteryear, there have to be some constraints on the range of ingredients thrown into the melting pot. Your stew will not be improved by the addition of ground-up spark plugs or enhanced by a liberal dose of WD-40.

Keeping with the gustatory metaphor, wide-open borders is a recipe for disaster.  

Victor Davis Hanson on the Higher Infantilization and its Cost

Is it not folly to go into deep debt to buy something wildly overpriced of little value?  And does it not contribute to  an unravelling of the moral fiber of the people for a morally obtuse grifter such as Joseph Biden to forgive debts freely incurred, thereby forcing sensible taxpayers to foot the bill?

Here's Hanson.

Signposts on the Way to the Insane Asylum

Top o' the Stack. 

J. D. Vance on Kamala the Chameleon

Under three minutes. 

Look, Dana, she's not running a political campaign. She's running a movie. She only speaks to voters behind a teleprompter. Everything is scripted. She doesn't have her policy positions out there. She hasn't answered why she wanted to ban fracking, but now she doesn't. She wanted to defund the police, but now she doesn't.

She wanted to open the border, but now she doesn't. She should have to answer for why she presents a different set of policies to one audience and a different set of policies to another audience. And I think that's what President Trump is getting at. This is a fundamentally fake person. She's different depending on who she's in front of.

Spot on. The fatuous fem is a fake, a phony, a fraud.  Almost everything out of her mouth is either incoherent or vacuous.  Have you ever heard her say anything that was neither? Tell me what it was.

Lanza del Vasto on Enchainment to Mere Means

Lanza del Vasto, Principles and Precepts of the Return to the Obvious (Schocken 1974, no translator listed), p. 93:

The Pursuit of the Useful raises an endless staircase in front of men.  Whoever climbs it with all his strength and all his thought can but come out of it dead, without even having perceived that he has spent his life fleeing his life.  The difficulty, the satisfactions and the regularity of the pursuit lead him to believe that it is fine, reasonable and good to put himself into it heart and soul.

The idolatry of the Useful is indicated by the fact that 'useless' universally carries a pejorative connotation when the truth is that the Useless Things are the Highest Things.

Lanza del Vasto with Simone Weil

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weather Conditions

'Debby' is the name of that hurricane harassing Florida? Disasters should be named after disasters: 'Hillary,' 'Kamala,' 'Nancy,' 'Gretchen,' . . . 

Earl Scruggs and Friends, Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Ella Fitzgerald, Misty. Beats the Johnny Mathis version. A standard from the Great American Songbook.

Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. Not from the Great American Songbook. And presumably not about weather conditions.  'Scuse me while I kiss the sky? Or: 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy?

Cream, Sunshine of Your Love

Tom Waits, Emotional Weather Report

Art Garfunkel and James Taylor, Crying in the Rain. Written by Carole King and popularized by the Everly Bros.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Written by Fred Rose and performed by Roy Acuff in the '40s.

Now my hair is turned to silver
All my life I've loved in vain
I can see her star in heaven
Blue eyes cryin' in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder
We'll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no parting
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Allman Bros., Blue Sky

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

Eric Clapton, Let It Rain

Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, Clouds ("Both Sides Now").  This beautiful version by "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" goes out to Oregon  luthier Dave Bagwill who I know will appreciate it. Judy Collins made a hit of it. And you still doubt that the '60s was the greatest decade for American popular music?  Speaking of the greatest decade, it was when the greatest writer of American popular songs, bar none, Bob Dylan, made his mark. Some generational chauvinism is justified! 

Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall Could Johnny Mercer write a song like this?

Eva Cassidy, Over the Rainbow. Another old standard from the Great American Songbook.

Tom Waits, On a Foggy Night

Rolling Stones, She's a Rainbow

Dan Fogelberg, Rhythm of the Rain

Cascades, Rhythm of the Rain. The original.

Dee Clark, Raindrops. Manny Mora:

"Raindrops" is a 1961 song by the American R&B singer Dee Clark. Released in April of that same year, this ballad peaked at position 2 on the Hot 100 and at position 3 on the R&B chart.  [. . .]

Clark's biggest hit was also his last. [. . .]

Clark had a brief revival in 1975 when his song "Ride a Wild Horse" became a surprise Top 30 hit in the UK Singles Chart, becoming his first chart hit in the UK since "Just Keep It Up." Afterwards, Clark performed mostly on the oldies circuit. By the late 1980s, he was in dire straits financially, living in a welfare hotel in Toccoa, Georgia. Despite suffering a stroke in 1987 that left him partially paralyzed and with a mild speech impediment, he continued to perform until his death on December 7th 1990, in Smyrna, Georgia, from a heart attack at the age of 52. His last concert was with the Jimmy Gilstrap Band at the Portman Lounge in Anderson, South Carolina.

Dave Bagwill sends us to a clip in which Dave van Ronk talks a bit about the days of the "Great American Folk Scare" and then sings his signature number, "Green, Green, Rocky Road."

Are There Any Arguments for an Afterlife in the New Testament?

Philoponus writes,

Is there anywhere in the NT where they argue for an afterlife, or is it an assumption shared by all the authors of the NT?  Passages?

Before I answer this question, there are a couple of logically prior questions of considerable interest.  First, is there any argumentation at all in the NT? Second, does Jesus argue for anything, or does he just make gratuitous (unsupported) assertions? (If he was, and eternally is, God, that would be his prerogative, right?) The answer to both questions is in the affirmative, as you can see from the following quotation from Dallas Willard's essay, Jesus as Logician:

(2). Another illustrative case is found in Luke 20:27-40. Here it is the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, who are challenging Jesus. They are famous for rejecting the resurrection (vs. 27), and accordingly they propose a situation that, they think, is a reductio ad absurdum of resurrection. (vss. 28-33) The law of Moses said that if a married man died without children, the next eldest brother should make the widow his wife, and any children they had would inherit in the line of the older brother. In the 'thought experiment' of the Sadducees, the elder of seven sons died without children from his wife, the next eldest married her and also died without children from her, and the next eldest did the same, and so on though all seven brothers. Then the wife died (Small wonder!). The presumed absurdity in the case was that in the resurrection she would be the wife of all of them, which was assumed to be an impossibility in the nature of marriage.

Jesus' reply is to point out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage and reproduction. They will have bodies like angels do now, bodies of undying stuff. The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any 'resurrection' must involve the body and its life continuing exactly as it does now. So the supposed impossibility of the woman being in conjugal relations with all seven brothers is not required by resurrection.

Then he proceeds, once again, to develop a teaching about the nature of God--which was always his main concern. Taking a premiss that the Sadducees accepted, he draws the conclusion that they did not want. That the dead are raised, he says, follows from God's self-description to Moses at the burning bush. God described himself in that incident as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (Luke 20:35 ) The Sadducees accepted this. But at the time of the burning bush incident, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been long 'dead', as Jesus points out. But God is not the God of the dead. That is, a dead person cannot sustain a relation of devotion and service to God, nor can God keep covenant faith with one who no longer exists. In covenant relationship to God one lives. (vs. 38) One cannot very well imagine the living God communing with a dead body or a non-existent person and keeping covenant faithfulness with them.

(Incidentally, those Christian thinkers who nowadays suggest that the Godly do not exist or are without conscious life, at least, from the time their body dies to the time it is resurrected, might want to provide us with an interpretation of this passage.)

Luke 20: 27-40 shows three things: there is argumentation in the NT; there is argumentation by Jesus  in the NT; and to Phil's query, there is argument about the afterlife in the NT, in the form of argument against and for the resurrection of the dead.

It is now my turn to ask  questions inasmuch as I am no scholar of the NT, nor do I play one in the blogosphere.

Q1: Did the Sadducees, in rejecting the resurrection of the body, equate that rejection with the rejection of personal immortality tout court?  My guess is yes.

Q2. Did any of the rabbis hold to a personal immortality along Platonic lines? My guess is no.

Nescio ergo blogo.

Finally, was it true that Jesus was a logician? Well he certainly was a not a theorist of logic along the lines of Aristotle or Frege.  Nor is Dallas Willard claiming that  he was. But Willard succeeds in showing that Jesus did argue and make typical logical moves.  The difference is that between logica docens and logica utens if I understand that distinction. It is the difference between logical theory and logical practice.

I first discovered Dallas Willard (1935-2013) as an undergraduate fascinated with Edmund Husserl and  his quest to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft. Willard was a Husserl man, and a good one.  Only much later did I discover  that this USC professor was a Christian apologist. May he rest in peace.

Here is my tribute to him.

Idolatry and Atheism

Substack wanted me to re-post this entry from four years ago. 

Share an old post

You originally published "Idolatry and Atheism" 4 years ago. Consider sharing it again with your readers. Sharing relevant old posts is a great way to engage your audience who might not have seen them already without having to create new content.

So I did despite the fact that they miscounted: it was only three years ago. No matter, it still reads well and speaks truth.  See if you don't agree.

How Reasonable is it to Rely on Reason Alone?

A Substack meditation on the occasion of Edith Stein's feast day.

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

Victor Davis Hanson on Tim Walz

13 hours ago. About 22 minutes long. Penetrating analysis of the recent rollercoaster of events, and excellent advice for Trump if he can rein in his ego sufficiently to take it and act on it.

More: The Harris Flop Would Be Scarier Than Her Flip

No one voted for the Biden-Harris ticket to borrow trillions sparking hyperinflation, to wage war on fossil fuels, to go woke, to welcome in 10 million illegal aliens, to abandon $50 billion in weapons to the terrorist Taliban, and to find America facing existential wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and soon perhaps over Taiwan.

But getting leftists elected requires fooling the American people into thinking their "moderate" campaign veneers will continue into their presidencies -- even though they never do.

So, for now, Harris and her new vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, will smother all their cherished left-wing positions -- at least until November.

The two left-wing chameleons will assume the temporary identities and policies of "moderates." That is a de facto admission that they know that the public does not want any of their true agendas.

The temporary metamorphosis means that the leftist nominees superficially feign agreement with what most Americans support --energy independence, low taxes, limited government, strong defense, deterrent foreign policy, secure borders, legal-only immigration, and assimilation rather than woke/DEI tribalism.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are the most brazen and extreme examples of left-wing flip-floppers in memory.

Kamala the chameleon is stupider than Pelosi, more mendacious than Hillary, and farther to the left than Joey.  And like him, nothing but a puppet. Her much-vaunted 'joy' is the laughing-gas inanity of  an over-grown adolescent ingenue. She is of the ilk of AOC, she of the occasional cortex.  

Physicalist Christology?

Notes on Merricks.  Substack latest.

Unrest in the U. K.

Three Dreher pieces at the top of his 'Stack.'  I am especially interested in comments from U. K. readers.

Britain: This Machete'd Isle

'A Riot is the Language of the Unheard'

Tommy the Savage

Is the world coming apart or is the world coming apart?

Filed under: Decline of the West

(369 entries and counting)

Kamala Harris Explains Cloud Data Storage

The ignorance of this woman is truly astonishing, as this 21 second video shows. Cloud storage is literally in the clouds above us which, by the way, are not physical!  But she cares so much, and she is not Trump. Surely these positives outweigh her ignorance of science, engineering, weaponry, history, geopolitics, economics . . . . And anyway, what does a puppet need to know?

We are in extreme danger, worse than that of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. Our geopolitical adversaries are licking their chops . . . .

The Projection of 'Weird' . . .

. . . is a weird projection.

Unwilling to acknowledge her own intellectual and moral deviancy, Kamala Harris projects her abnormalcy into the likes of J. D. Vance.  She is followed in this by her sycophants in the mainstream media.  This is psychological projection so extreme that it takes the breath away.  "The flamboyantly incompetent imbecile Harris," to borrow an apt appellation from our friend Malcolm Pollack, is the weirdest cackling gasbag of vacuity to come along in a long time. I don't have time at the moment to rehearse the litany of inanity on this sick specimen of flip-flopping mendacity, but in the run-up to November I will not hesitate to do so. 

The mountain bike beckons so I'll hand off to Tucker.

Sunday Afternoon at the Oldies: Bluegrass

Here. HT: Ingvarius Maximus the Alhambran.

USA 2024

Manebant vestigia morientis libertatis: there still remained traces of dying liberty (Tacitus).

Liberty on the wane, yet traces remain. Traces enough for a foothold forward.  Time to  join the fight, Fight, FIGHT. Which side are you on? Trump-Vance 2024.  Long live the republic!

Man Does not Live by Bread Alone

Or by bed alone.

Top o' the Stack.

Melum ut in pluribus

I am having trouble understanding the above Latin expression. I encountered it in Theodor Haecker, Kierkegaard the Cripple (tr. C. Van O. Bruyn, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950) in the passage:

Not only for Augustine, but also for that Christian whose teaching is most perfectly harmonious, Thomas Aquinas, the evil in the world was always in the majority. Melum ut in pluribus. This must never be forgotten, nor was it in Kierkegaard's judgment. (pp. 29-30)

My first question: why melum and not malum?

Second question: where in Thomas can we find melum ut in pluribus?

Wiktionary informs us:

Borrowed from Ancient Greek μῆλον (mêlon). Doublet of mālum, from dialectal Ancient Greek μᾶλον (mâlon). First attested in Petronius.

Now mēlum n (genitive mēlī) means apple, and malum, mali means evil, adversity, torment, misery, punishment, etc.  This answers my first question but gives rise to a third: Is there some connection here with the Adam and Eve story in the Garden? 

Fourth question: I don't recall ever seeing the word 'apple' in my English versions of Genesis. Is there in the original text of Genesis a word that translates as 'apple'?  

Fifth question:  I don't understand ut in this context.  Wiktionary says it can be used as an adverb or as a conjunction. But it doesn't seem to be used in either way in melum ut in pluribus.

Here are some other Latin phrases most of which my astute readers already know. 

Michael Anton on "Celebration Parallax"

Here:

More tellingly, this charge is an example of something I call the “celebration parallax,” which is explained here. In brief, the celebration parallax holds that the same fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it and, crucially, the perceived intent of the speaker.

So if someone says that the U.S. is experiencing levels of immigration that are unprecedented in human history, if it’s presumed or suspected that he might have doubts, then he is an evil racist. But when Bill Clinton or Joe Biden makes exactly the same point, well, that is A-OK! Because they are “good guys” who welcome “an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop” (Joe Biden’s words). By the way, I leave to readers to intuit the difference between “unrelenting” (Joe’s word) and “ceaseless” (my word) and the reasons why the former is A-OK but the latter is somehow “racist.”

Word of the Day: Triolet

Here:

An eight-line stanza having just two rhymes and repeating the first line as the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line as the eighth. See Sandra McPherson’s “Triolet” or “Triolets in the Argolid” by Rachel Hadas. 

Return

 

The taste is strong as ever,

figs and cheese and wine.

I recall each savor;

the taste is strong as ever,

even if it will never

be quite so fresh again.

The taste is strong as ever,

figs and cheese and wine.

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

 

I will now try to write a triolet.

 

Hooked

 

The ancient lures entice me still,

Property, pelf, and power.

Even if against my will,

The ancient lures entice me still.

Despite advancing age and wisdom's rise,

Their grip on me is unreleasing.

The ancient lures entice me still,

Property, pelf, and  power.

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

 

But I'm no poet, and I know it, so there's no way I could blow it.