Maverick Philosopher

The Decivilizing of America

Another outstanding article by VDH.  If you read this blog you will most likely agree with it. But then why do I link to it?  To supply you with argumentative ammo.  In a war you cannot have too much ammo.

Pope Francis Dead at 88

I have issued some trenchant statements over the years about the late Pope Francis, but for now my watchword is: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  I will only add that in the wee hours of yesterday's vigil, before I became aware of Francis's passing,  I was re-reading Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's 1968 Introduction to Christianity in pursuit of the question lately raised about the meaning of "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36) I was once again impressed by the power and penetration of the thinking of the man who later became Pope Benedict XVI. As I was admiring Ratzinger's philosophical and theological 'chops,' I thought disparagingly of the pope now passed.

Our friend Vito Caiati sent me this morning a rather more incisive  take on the late pope.

I would like to share my thoughts on the current reaction to the death of Pope Francis, which I find worrisome and which reminded me of some advice of Montaigne on speaking of the powerful after death.

He writes:

“Among the laws that relate to the dead, it seems to me very sound those by which the actions of princes are to be examined after their decease. They are equals with, if not masters of the laws, and what justice could not inflict upon their heads [persons], it is reason that it should be executed upon their reputations and the estates of their successors—things that we often value above life itself” (Les essais de Montaigne, v.1, c 3 [my translation]).

All over X, yesterday and this morning, the whitewashing of Pope Francis, by his ideological allies and his “conservative” critics alike, continues unabated. Very few voices—most notably that of Archbishop Viganò*—dare to speak the truth, for self-interest and cowardice continue to rule. So, I ask: After twelve years of deceit, heresy, repression, and scandal, must we now also bear this mindless outpouring of fallacious sentiment, much of it nothing but deception, about this malevolent and destructive man? Rather on these days of all days, must we not, if “justice” is to be served, speak the truth about the grave harms he inflicted on the faithful and the Church?  If truth is not told, the current wave of historical eradication, both that purposely propagated by the leftist, doctrinally tainted episcopate installed by Bergoglio and that arising from the unreflective sentimentality of the masses, may well result in the irredeemable upending of the RCC, which is already in a perilous state of decline.   

 Vito

 * https://x.com/CarloMVigano/status/1914273114587824193

 

Politics by Assassination, Anyone?

Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. What I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means. David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability.  Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles.  But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point.  Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it.  Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life.  Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich.  Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case.  You are politically dead.

Politics is war.  Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

A semantic stretch is involved in Horowitz's "Politics is war." On a very strict definition of 'war,' war is only between states.  To put it pedantically, the only admissible values of the variables x, y in 'x is at war with y' are states. If so, there cannot be a war on drugs, on terror, on Christmas, a war between political factions or parties, between sub-state entities, or between a sub-state entity such as Hamas and a state such as Israel.

Critical thinking requires close attention to extended (stretched) uses of terms. Nevertheless, some semantic extensions are justified: politics is sufficiently like war to be called war.  In war sensu stricto assassination is often justified. 

This brings me to Luigi Mangione and his (alleged)  assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care.  Mangione has been charged with the premeditated murder of Thompson whom he shot in the back, not for personal reasons, but for political ones. So, with a bit of a stretch, we may call Mangione's (alleged) killing of Thompson a case of political assassination, despite the fact that Thompson was not a politician.

Now to the point: if you have no problem with Mangione's deed, then, by parity of reasoning, you should have no problem  with some right-winger assassinating U. S. District Judge James Boasberg.  Recall:

Mr. Trump signed a proclamation under the Alien Enemies Act last month, claiming that Tren de Aragua is "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion" against the U.S. and declaring that all members of the gang in the U.S. unlawfully were subject to immediate detention and removal. [. . .] 

The day after Mr. Trump's proclamation, five Venezuelan nationals who were being held at a detention center in Texas filed a lawsuit that alleged Mr. Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act violated the terms of the law and asked a federal district court in Washington, D.C., to block their removals.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg swiftly agreed to stop their deportations for 14 days and later expanded his temporary order to prohibit the administration from removing all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to Mr. Trump's proclamation.

So: Do you have a problem with assassinating U. S. District Judges who unconstitutionally presume to put themselves about the duly-elected Commander-in-Chief who quite reasonably ordered the deportation of vicious Tren de Aragua illegal aliens?  I do! 

This is why I consider the death penalty to be what justice demands in the Mangione case, should he be convicted.  If he is found guilty, he should be made an example of and executed within a 'reasonable' period of time (two years?), time enough for a 'reasonable' number of appeals (two? three?).  I'm all for due process and the presumption of innocence.

We are doomed if we do not take a strong stand against  assassination.

Unfortunately, a majority of leftists, according to this article, think political assassination is a societal good. Excerpt:

Before the 21st century, Democrats were mostly working- and middle-class Americans who believed in the rule of law and loved America. The murderous ones—the violent Black Panthers and Weathermen—existed on the fringe. Now, though, the fringe has moved to the heart of the Democrat party, which is a death cult. And like all death cults, it’s requiring greater sacrifices. The latest manifestation is that a majority of self-identified leftists believe that assassinating people for political ends (e.g., Donald Trump and Elon Musk) is fully justified.

One of the things that radical Muslims and leftists have in common is that they are death cults. The Islamic penchant for rape, torture, and murder on gleefully sadistic scales (e.g., the Yazidis, Israelis, and Christians in Africa) speaks for itself. However, we in the West have been indoctrinated not to recognize the Democrat death cult for what it is.

To the leftist fools who call for political assassinations, whether in plain English, or under cover of such formulations as "Take down Elon Musk," I say:  Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind! (Hosea 8:7)

Related:  Paul Gottfried, On Democratic Party Violence

MACGA: Make the Continent Great Again!

Europe has lost its collective mind. The UK is especially troubling:

The University of Oxford, one of the most revered and historic institutions of higher learning in the world, has requested that Oxford city council officials add the names of five soldiers who fought against Great Britain in the First World War to a memorial honoring Britain’s war dead. You cannot make this up.

The five individuals – Oxford alumni all – include three individuals born on German territory, one born on Hungarian soil, and another born in Poland. They all fought against the Allied armies in World War I, but will nonetheless be "honored" alongside Britain’s war dead. Talk about losing the plot.

My maternal grandfather, of Hungarian birth, fought in the Austro-Hungarian army as a forward artillery observer in the First World War. He survived the war, but had he not, I would never expect his name to be added to a monument honoring the casualties of Britain in the Great War.

This bizarre news comes on the heels of real "progressive" depredations on European "values" – those old-fashioned things like freedom of speech, democratically elected officials and so on. In a case of political persecution via the judiciary, remarkably similar to what Donald Trump suffered at the hands of numerous U.S. courts, a French court sentenced the most popular French politician and likely future French President, Marine Le Pen, to four years in prison for alleged improper use of European Union funds. The case revolved around the conservative populist Le Pen and other members of her National Rally party using funds from the EU to allegedly improperly reimburse aides for political work. Le Pen and her colleagues denied all along that they did anything improper. Le Pen was sentenced to four years, with two years likely to be suspended and the other two years requiring an ankle bracelet and no incarceration.

The Message of Visible Tattoos

Top o' the Stack.

Me? I sport no tattoos and never will. My dress is functional and tailored to the needs of the occasion. No one could accuse me of being a Sharp-Dressed Man

If Trump Wins, the Left is Prepared to Intensify the War

Yesterday's Substack entry ended as follows:

Whatever the outcome on 5 November, the war will continue, intensify, and become increasingly ‘existential.’ That is to say: it will become less verbal, less cultural, [i.e., less like a mere culture war'] hotter, and more like a real war. The conflict unto death in which we are currently embroiled is deeply rooted in philosophical soil. To borrow the title of Thomas Sowell’s great 1987 book, it is A Conflict of Visions.

It appears that Trump has a good chance of winning. Our political enemies, of course, will not accept that result since they reject the American constitutional republic which makes provision for a  peaceful transfer of power. Aiming at a "fundamental transformation of America," in Barack Hussein Obama's phrase, they are out to overturn our system of government. But being the stealth ideologues that they are, they will not 'own their intentions,' which is to say: they will not plainly state their plans. This is why Comrade Kamala utters  the most vacuous of phrases when she is not outright lying. She comes across as an airhead, but she is less of a an airhead than she appears. She is a crafty political operator, not unlike Pelosi who also adopts the persona (mask) of the harmless dingbat. Kamala signals to her leftist base with the assurance that "my values haven't changed." She is assuring them that despite all the empty rhetoric, outright lies, and apparent reversals of position, she is still the same old hard-Left political Californicator she always was.

To appreciate the gravity of the situation and the danger we are in I refer you to Is the Left Preparing for War if Trump Wins? It begins:

The propaganda campaign labeling Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator determined to use the military and national security apparatus against his political opponents is designed not to affect the upcoming election but rather to shape the post-election environment. It is the central piece of a narrative that, by characterizing Trump as a tyrant (indeed likening him to Hitler), establishes the conditions for violence — not just another attempt on Trump’s life, but political violence on a massive scale intended to destabilize the country. 

As I write in my forthcoming book Disappearing the President, Democratic Party research and media reports show that many senior party officials and operatives are preparing for the possibility of a Trump victory. Accordingly, planning is focused on undermining the incoming president with enough violence to rock his administration. Prominent post-election scenarios forecast such widespread rioting that the newly elected president would be compelled to invoke the Insurrection Act. With some senior military officials refusing to follow Trump’s orders, according to the scenarios, the U.S. Armed Forces would split, leaving America on the edge of the abyss. 

Elon Musk: If Trump loses, 2024 will be our last election

Here. The title claim begins at 3:05. His explanation of the claim is cogent, and I fear he is right. 'Interesting' times, these. Who could be bored?

UPDATE 10/28:  Elon at the Trump MSG rally.

Kamala the Destroyer

Tom Klingenstein understands what's going on:

Republicans criticize Kamala Harris for refusing to reveal her agenda, but, as Frank Cannon points out, she already has. Her agenda is the agenda of her vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota — someone Harris “ loves,” as she said recently. Unlike Kamala, Walz’s agenda and his beliefs are out there for all to see. He supports the full belief system of what I am calling “Kamalism”: a utopian society, today nominally led by Kamala, based on equal group outcomes. 

Admitting people to college or flight training school (or anything else) based on quotas is the essence of the destructive Left’s “social justice,” which is utterly irreconcilable with American justice, which is based on individual merit. Because these are two understandings of justice (as occurred in the Civil War) it’s one or the other, group quotas or merit. A house divided against itself cannot stand; it will be all one thing to another. Not to put too fine a point on it: Kamalism must try to destroy America (and of course the reverse: we must try to save it). So, let’s frame the election: “Kamalism versus America.”

This is by far the most important aspect of this election. One candidate wants to destroy our country ; the other wants to save it. This seems to me what virtually every politician misses. This election should not primarily be about immigration or crime or inflation or anything else Republican and Democrat politicians talk about. It should be about whether to elect a woman who wants to destroy America or a man who wants to improve it. But it isn’t. If we are to save America we must make the election about this choice, for every voter, right up until Election Day. 

Moral Community and Civil War

Substack latest. 

An exchange with Malcolm Pollack.

The 2020 Theft Saved the Country

The argument of this article goes through even if the 2020 election was not stolen from Trump. Biden's reversal of Trump's good works has exposed the thoroughly depredatory nature of our political enemies and has galvanized Trump and his supporters. The Orange Man has learned a lot in the interim.  First-rate ass-kickers have joined his team, Elon Musk and J. D. Vance to mention but two. His four-year sabbatical has done him good.  Compare Vance to Pence to get a sense of what I mean.

I find it hard to avoid schadenfreude when I think of the pain of leftists, whether full-on Dementocrats or RINO-cratic fellow travelers.   So, to rub it in: if you depredatory chucklephucks hadn't opposed Trump with your vicious lies and dirty tricks, you would be done with him in four months. 

Some say that Trump is 'divisive.' Here is my 26 August 2017 rebuttal:

To say of Trump or anyone that he is divisive is to say that he promotes  division. But there is no need to promote it these days since we already have plenty of it. We are a deeply and perhaps irreparably divided nation.  So it is not right to say that Trump is divisive: he is standing on one side of an already existing divide.

Trump did not create the divide between those who stand for the rule of law and oppose sanctuary cities, porous borders, illegal immigration and irresponsibly lax legal immigration policies.  What he did is take up these issues fearlessly, something his milque-toast colleagues could not bring themselves to do.  

And he has met with some success: illegal immigration is down some 50%. 

So-called 'liberals' and their RINO pals call him a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe. That they engage in this slander shows that the nation is bitterly divided over fundamental questions. It also shows what kind of people our political enemies are. 

Too often journalistic word-slingers shoot first and ask questions never. Wouldn't it be nice if they thought before their lemming-like and knee-jerk deployment of such adjectives as 'divisive'?

Language matters.

We are in deep trouble as a country, and as a consequence, the world is as well.  The fight for civilization is only just beginning.

 

 

The Road to One-Party Rule

Here is the Democrat plan clearly explained in a few words.

9/11: 23 Years Later

Substack latest

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?

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!

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.

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 . . . .

Novus Ordo?

Giving a  Latin name to the destruction of the ancient Latin rite smacks of mockery.

Chicago under Democrat 'Control'

Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago  

I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
Well my father told me
Son you had better get a gun.

True then, truer now. 

And you still be ridin' with Biden? How stupid can you be? How self-destructive? How willfully self-enstupidated? And of course the scourge is not upon Chicago alone but upon every Dem-'controlled' city, county, state, and jurisdiction.

The humorous meme is now a reality:  ammo vending machines are coming to stores.  That's no joke.

I'm a staunch supporter of 2A rights, but this cannot be a good development. What's next? Ammo sales at drive-through liquor stores? "Would you like a box of ammo to go with your bottle of Hornitos tequila?  Today's special is Federal 115 gr FMJ 9 mm hollow point."  

To vote Democrat is to vote for more crime and the defunding of professional law enforcement  The more crime,  the more the burden of personal defense is placed on the citizen. But the average citizen is unlikely to get the proper training and to devote the time needed to become proficient in the use of firearms.  The upshot is more accidental negligent discharges. In a well-functioning society, the laws are enforced and the criminal element is kept in check so that the citizen can go about his business without the need to, and the grave responsibility that comes with, 'packing heat.'  

And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you?

Related: Shooting Up Chicago

The Cluster B Society

How psychological dysfunction has been embedded in our institutions.

CHRISTOPHER F. RUFO

SEP 20, 2023

 

 

Will a Perfect Storm Soon be upon us?

Anthony Flood thinks so.  Here is how his piece begins:

The dictionary defines a perfect storm as an “unusual combination of events or things that produce an unusually bad or powerful result.” The latter, as I see it, is life as we’ve become accustomed to enjoying it.

Four years ago, I stated my grounds . . . . 

And now Flood adds to the list:

My list didn’t give sufficient attention to the open southern border of the United States, which is being invaded daily in great numbers, or the explosion of urban crime.

I was not thinking of the resurrection of Nazi-level, genocidalist  antisemitism within the walls of the institutions tasked with handing on civilization’s treasures.

I inexcusably paid no attention at all to the moral depravity that acquiesces in (if not celebrates) infanticide and the gender confusion that spits on the revelation of God (Genesis 1:27, 5:2; Matthew 19:4-6) Whom the “perfect stormtroopers” hate because they love death (Proverbs 8:36). Structural instabilities have followed the culture of death as the night the day. (I’ll let others decide if the charge of post hoc, ergo propter hoc is relevant.)

The world-historical figure who may win the general election in 168 days (to which victory I will contribute) may slow the rate of decline and postpone some of its consequences, but he can’t reverse it.

On November 6, 2024, no perfect stormtrooper will say, “Well, you beat us fair and square! Better luck next time!” No, they’re prepared to “accept” such an electoral result the way the PLO famously “accepted” the state of Israel, that is, an enemy to be destroyed and whose people are to be exterminated. Their plans to destroy Western Civ in general and its American outpost in particular will be pursued.

Like Napoleon, Trump may reshape the trajectory of a post-revolutionary era and bevel a few of its sharp edges. In the offing, however, I see no counterrevolution worthy of the name. As I wrote in the cited post:

Call me a secular pessimist (although I’m an eschatological optimist), but I see no liberation in this dispensation, libertarian or otherwise, from those scourges. God will stop the wicked in their tracks:

So shall they [God’s enemies] fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him (Isaiah 59:19).

He’ll lift it. God’s promised government is a future intervention that God, not man, will inaugurate; its blessings will be manifest to all, and delivered directly. “Thy Kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10).

Think you can cheer me up in the short run? Have at it.

Mass Migration and Crime

Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Under 13 minutes. HT: Dave Bagwill.

Dave adds:

Elon Musk later weighed in on Eva’s remarks.

“The problem with “Great Replacement Theory” is that it fails to address the foundational issue of low birth rates.

Record low birth rates are leading to population collapse in Europe and even faster population collapse in most of Asia. Immigration is low in Asia, so there is no “replacement” going on, the countries are simply shrinking away.

If this doesn’t turn around, then any countries on Earth with low birth rates will become empty of people and fall into ruin, like the remains we see of the many long dead civilizations.”

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2024

Eva’s speech already has 36.7 million views in less than 48 hours.

This speech is the reason why the Biden administration and Western elites are so desperate to control speech. They can’t allow the people to have access to free thoughts and differing ideas. Because the elites are leading Western civilization to ruin. It appears that was their plan all along.

Quotations from Chairman Maher

Christopher Rufo has her number.

The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions.

Maher is no aberration. She is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and DEI. They are the matriarchs of the American Longhouse: they value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.

Here, Rufo interviews Larry Sanger about NPR CEO Maher. Excerpt:

Sanger: The fact that she is not immediately hounded out of her job—and she won’t be, I’m sure—shows you how profoundly and how quickly the culture of not just the Internet, but of the United States and the West in general, has changed.

The fact that you had to do some research and surface these videos, that they weren’t immediately caught as smoking-gun evidence of how bad things have gotten, shows you that the attitudes that she expresses are what we expect these days.

Poor Maher! She suffers from both TDS and Truth Decay.

Signposts on the Way to the Insane Asylum

• Looting is shopping without money.
• The 2022 riots were peaceful.
• The border is secure.
• Trespassing is insurrection.
• Dissent is hate.
• Free speech is hate speech.
• Barring candidates from the ballot is democratic.
• Abortion is health care.
• 'Migrants' are newcomers.
• The only purpose of guns is to kill people.
• Math is racist.
• There is no 'migrant' crisis.
• Diversity is our strength.
• 'DEI' is the new 'N' word.
• Coercive confiscation of firearms is gun buy-back. 
• Sex of a baby is not biologically inherent but a matter of 'assignment.'
• Race and sex are social constructs.
• To oppose the sexual mutilation of children is 'transphobic.'
• '2A'  is a terrorist marker.
• White supremacy is the greatest threat we face.
• 'Blind review' denigrates the sightless.
• The disabled are 'differently abled.'
• To argue against the moral acceptability of homosexual practices is 'homophobic.'

I am just getting warmed up. But I'm sure you've caught the drift by now. Each of these bullet points can be nailed down with numerous references which I have supplied elsewhere in many a post.

It is now your turn to do something in defense of civilization. 

The Civil War Movie

Rather than submitting to sensory assault, your time would be better spent quietly preparing in three separate senses I will explain later. I won't be seeing the movie, for reasons given by my Alypius and the Gladiators.

Addendum: Why bother watching a fictional civil war scenario when the first phases of hot civil war are unfolding right before our eyes on the nightly news? We have an advantage over St Augustine: we are able to watch the collapse of civilization on television. The big disadvantage for us is that the collapse may take a nuclear turn.

So what do our pollyannish friends and neighbors do? They piss their lives away gaming, golfing, drinking and dancing, willfully oblivious of danger, feeling no responsibility to preserve the civilization that made it possible for them to live good lives up to this point, and irresponsibly ignoring the obligation to preserve it for future generations.

The worst of this bunch are those who brazenly deny the impending disaster.

Victor Davis Hanson, historian and classicist, can help you understand the gravity of the situation.  Can you pay attention for eight and a half minutes?

Doing Well by Doing Good

A successful urologist I know told me that he and his colleagues want to do well by doing good.  An excellent formulation, but inapplicable to Joe Biden.  He wants to do well whether or not he does good. He wants such  trappings and results of worldly success as power and position, money and property,  even if he must destroy the country to get them. Good old Traitor Joe, violator of sacred vows, brazen liar, serial plagiarist, slanderer of decent people, threat to the peace and stability of the nation and the world.  If you support him, you are as despicable as he is. You might also consider that a vote for him is a vote for Kamala Harris. 

You say you don't like Donald Trump? I don't like him that much either. But politics is a practical pursuit. It is not about perfect versus imperfect but about better versus worse. I invite you to give some thought to the question whether you and your family and the nation and the world will be better off with another term of Trump or another of Biden. I invite you, for your own good, to inform yourself and exercise whatever critical faculties you possess.

Sabotage Anyone?

Should a state university add "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" to its curriculum?

This is an undoubtedly interesting time to be alive. How could anyone be bored?

Should I rename my Academia category, Academentia?

Demented POTUS, demented polity. Madness spreads and the fish stinks from the head.

Update (3:39 pm): More academentia at UCLA medical school. Unbelievable, but you'd better believe it.

Richard Dawkins on Christianity and Islam

Here (HT: Catacomb Joe):

Famed atheist and self-styled intellectual Richard Dawkins shared in a recent interview that he was “horrified” to find that Oxford Street in London had lit up its public signs and displays to celebrate the Muslim fasting period called Ramadan, just days before Easter Sunday. “I have to choose my words carefully: If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins declared, expressing concern over the thousands of Muslim mosques being constructed across the U.K. He added, “It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”

I hope to say more about this later. Now I have to prepare for a meeting with Brian the Calvinist.  First lunch and casual conversation about the events of the day and the latest outrages of the depredatory Left, then intense philosophical conversation about Jesus and the Powers, a stimulating albeit flawed book, and finally  two or so hours of battling over the 64 squares. 

That's the kind of socializing I like. Otherwise, solitude rules. 

Homage to Catatonia

That's right, Catatonia.

Are things really this bad, or does the author exaggerate?

Dreher on Carlson

The former comments on the latter's recent speech.  Dreher:

It is so very, very, very difficult to wake up people to what is happening, what has been happening, and what is probably going to happen. I have experienced in my personal life how the Everything’s Fine™ mentality can destroy everything, and I see it everywhere in our culture and society.

Quite so. People need to wake up.  Wake up and 'woke' down.

It's astonishing how fast we are collapsing. Second Amendment rights for illegal aliens? Elimination of the bar exam in Oregon and other states?

My Substack article, The Conservative Disadvantage, is relevant.

Two Termites: Bergoglio and Biden

I sometimes refer to the current pope as Bergoglio the Termite to underscore the destructive effect he is having on a once-great institution. Early this morning it occurred to me that I might write a post comparing the various termites undermining our institutions. Of course 'President' Joe Biden immediately came to mind. Just now, an e-mail crossed the transom pointing me to an article in which William Kilpatrick, whom I have often approvingly quoted,  does part of the job for me, comparing the termitic attributes of Bergoglio and Biden. I recommend it for your perusal.

Needless to say, when I refer to Bergoglio as a termite, that is a figurative use of language: I am not suggesting that he is literally an insect or ought to be 'rubbed out' by chemical or other means.  People who cannot distinguish between the literal and the figurative show a lack of intelligence. Most recently, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC and others of his scrofulous ilk have shown this lack of intelligence when they failed to grasp  that Donald Trump's recent use of 'bloodbath' was figurative, not literal.* 

Joey B struggles with the distinction as well. Remember his  “The American people literally stood on the brink of a new Depression”?  That was around 2013 if memory serves. 

It is worth noting that not every term of abuse is purely abusive: 'termite' as applied to Jorge and Joseph (both of whose initials are 'J. B.') is not purely abusive in that it contains a factual core: both of these clowns are in fact working to destroy  their respective institutions.  Wittingly or unwittingly? I am inclined to say wittingly in the case of Bergoglio, unwittingly in the case of the demented Biden.  

There is of course a serious moral question connected to the use of abusive language meant to express contempt for fellow human beings.  But in a war against such anti-civilizational forces as we now face, different rules of engagement are permissible. Or so it seems. A hard nut to crack.

___________________

*You could of course respond to me that Scarborough and Co. understand the literal-figurative distinction and also understand that context is crucial in the interpretation of anyone's oral or written remark.  They probably do. But then it is even worse for them: they are trying to bamboozle the American people.  This is a moral defect, which is worse than a failure of understanding. Dripping with intellectual dishonesty and disregard for truth, these people warrant our contempt 

Tucker Carlson on What is to be Done

We have been discussing how to proceed against our anti-civilizational political enemies. This essay by Carlson is not all that good, but it is worth a quick read-through. His points about truth and death are spot on.

Nicole Gelinas in Regressives explains how a healthy progressivism transmogrified into regressivism rendering Gotham the shithole it now is.

The beauty of blog is that the blogger is under no editor who might take umbrage at the occurrence of 'transmogrified' and 'shithole' in one and the same sentence.

2024: The Last Year of the Republic?

A New York friend of mine writes,

When I settled in Jackson Heights after leaving Mom's Bronx nest almost a half-century ago, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Great architecture, uncongested sidewalks, a police presence, and elderly ladies taking a stroll in the early evening were among the first things that struck me. It's now, to coin a  cliché, a third-world shithole run into the ground by "progressives." Few of its current denizens remember when it was otherwise.

The same friend thinks we won't make it to November.  When he so opined some months back, I thought that this might just be perspectival distortion due to his perch in Jackson Heights.  But he may well be right.  Another friend sends me here where we read some concrete suggestions of the sort that I have been asking for, but Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Levin,  and so many other astute commentators fail to make, content as they are merely to analyze and report:

. . . the next eight months should be spent getting prepared.

So, yes, I want you to vote in November — and, yes, I want you to prepare for the communist takeover of America when your vote won’t matter anymore. That might seem contradictory or incoherent but it’s basic strategy: you plan to win the battle, but you also plan for an orderly retreat so that you can survive to fight another day.

No, I’m not being gloomy or hopeless. I’m not telling you to quit. I’m not encouraging you to stop voting. I’m telling you to get prepared. What does that really mean? It means you should get a satellite phone. You should buy more guns and ammo. You should stockpile medicine and water and food. Hold cash. Hold gold and silver. Have an emergency plan with your friends and family.

It’s time to get serious.

{. . .]

You do realize that you’re in the middle of a global conspiracy to end the democratic West, right? You’ve heard about The Great Reset haven’t you? You don’t want to believe it’s true — of course. That’s why you keep ignoring the obvious signs.

That’s called: magical thinking.

We’re already at the stage of the communist revolution in which 320,000 illegal aliens have been flown into the United States by the Biden regime to occupy your country and to eventually serve as soldiers and police who are loyal to the communists.

We’re already at the stage when the agents of the Biden regime are openly admitting that they will not allow Trump to hold the office again if he’s elected. They’re telling you he should be denied classified briefings right now. They’re telling you that it’s time to dissolve the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and order American soldiers to disarm the people. They will not allow a peaceful transfer of power.

I hope that I’m wrong — butwhat happens to you if I’m right?

This is good advice. We don't despair or give up, we fight on "in the gloaming" to use my poetic phrase. We vote and we prep. Both. It's twilight time for the West, and while it is true that the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk (as per the Hegelian trope), and we philosophers rejoice at the wisdom gained when the bird takes flight, we philosophers still attached to gross-material bodies  endeavor to push that final denoument as far into the future as possible. After all, no one KNOWS whether or not there is anything beyond this scene of strife, this miserably mundane mundus sensibilis. (Am I sending a coded message that only white-supremacist dogs can hear?)

We fight on. We vote and we prep. And when we vote we do so not only with ballots but with our feet and our wallets.  Buy  a satphone. I hadn't thought of recommending that. Excellent suggestion for something you can do.  Take the rest of Emerald Robinson's advice.

But don't expect any help from the Judas Iscariots and con artists of the pseudo-con Right. David French is a prime example as are Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney,  Chris Christie, and so many others. Turncoats, quislings, yap-and-scribble lapdogs of the Left, cuckservative clowns, worse than useless, worse even than the cadre-commie anti-civilizational woke-joke leftards.

French and Pence are justly pilloried here.

UPDATE (3/16)

That well-fed, miserably misguided matron Liz Cheney is torn to pieces by Kash Patel here.

The greatest con job ever to happen in American politics is the false Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative. The singular mission of this narrative is to stop Donald Trump from ever setting foot in the Oval Office again. 

A key pillar of the left’s propaganda about insurrection is to distort the truth surrounding whether Trump authorized, prior to Jan. 6, the deployment of National Guard troops to keep order on that day. The main architect of this disinformation campaign is former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.  

Issues and Insights is another good source of anti-totalitarian punch-back. This article, for example:

Democrats don’t support open borders for humanitarian reasons. They want the lines erased because they see every illegal alien as a likely Democratic voter crucial to their political power grab. But there’s another reason: They want to increase the populations of Democratic states to boost their representation in Congress and the Electoral College.

Apparently it’s not enough for Democrats to have become authoritarians, they have to be corrupt, too.

Of course this is no surprise. Only the corrupt become authoritarians. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek showed in chapter 10 of “The Road to Serfdom” why socialist systems never have decent people in charge.

“Bad men,” Hayek explained in Why the Worst Get on Top, have no inhibitions about running other peoples’ lives. It is “the unscrupulous and uninhibited,” he wrote in 1944, who “are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”

Put another way, by Dune author Frank Herbert, “​​Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”

And thus we understand why the Democratic Party is overflowing with the most wretched people imaginable. It’s a party that draws in the worst among us in much the same way communism attracted the Lenins, Stalins, Maos and Castros.

The kakistocrats that captain the Democratic Party are so lacking in principle and so filled with villainy that they are using illegal aliens as pawns in their scheme to establish unopposed, unchallengeable power.

How can we know this? Because not a single Democrat voted last week in favor of an amendment from Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty that would allow only citizens to be “counted for the purposes of allocating congressional districts and electoral votes.”

When Hagerty offered the amendment, “the Democrats just went nuts,” he said. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer “threatened to shut the government down.”

The Latest from Peter van Inwagen

This just over the transom:

Dear Sir, 

Recently I have been looking for some work by Peter van Inwagen and found his recent book Being A Study in Ontology. I believe the subject could be very interesting to you, because, as far as I know, you have written several times on his ontological views (even if there is deep disagreements between his and yours ontological views). 

 

I hope you are doing well in this messy and unpredictable world. 

 

Kind regards, 

Miloš Milojević 

 

Dear Mr. Milojević,

 

Thank you for bringing this book to my attention.  I will try to persuade the editor of a journal to send me a review copy. Failing that, I will happily shell out 75 USD for a copy. The undisputed 'king' of the 'thin theorists,' van Inwagen is wrong about Being, but brilliantly wrong and a formidable adversary. 

 

I have addressed his views many times in these pages and a few times in print.  Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method is one; "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" ( in Daniel D. Novotny and Lukas Novak (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge. pp. 45-75. 2014.) is another.

 

Other articles of mine on Being and existence can be found via my PhilPeople page.

 

As for this "messy and unpredictable world," let's hope it holds together for a few more years. I see no reason to be optimistic, but I derive consolation both from philosophy and from old age. In the meantime we must do our part-time best to beat back the forces of darkness.  Only part-time, however, because this world is a vanishing quantity that does not merit the full measure of our love and attention. All things worldly must pass. "Impermanence is swift." (Dogen) "Work out your salvation with diligence." (Buddha)

 

Finally, Miloš, I  thank you for your correspondence over the years,

 

Bill

 

Musical addendum

 

If Harrison was the Beatle with spiritual depth, Lennon was the radical leftist shallow-pate, McCartney the romantic, and Starr the regular guy and good-time Charley.

American Paralysis and Decline

Yet another by Victor Davis Hanson. There is nothing to disagree with here.

But Victor, what is to be done?

Surely you have some suggestions! You have demonstrated great civil courage by speaking your mind openly. What prevents you from taking the next step? Is it because you think it would be 'unprofessional' to do so? I have been following and promoting you for years. You are now at the top of your game. You have made it in America. I salute you with deep respect.

Do you see yourself as a scholar and a theoretician merely?  How much research and writing do you think you will accomplish in a concentration camp or in a war zone?

Civilization Versus the New Nihilists

 Victor Davis Hanson

Put the question to your friends and acquaintances: Which side are you on? If they are not on the side of civilization, cut them off.  Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? If enough of us ostracize enough of them, this will have an effect.  (The usual ceteris paribus qualifications apply.)

Here's my take from 2017:

The Nihilism of the Left

Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:

Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.

The Muslim as the new proletarian.

The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)

Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.

It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.

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

And here is another by my man Hanson, the writing machine, on the insanity of leftists.  It's on the russia, Russia, RUSSIA! hoax. To hell with these TDS-ers and their self-induced lunacy.  They don't seem to grasp that they have a moral obligation to exercise due diligence in the formation of their beliefs. That is an obligation that they regularly flout. 

There is just no moral or intellectual equivalence between Right and Left. 

Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:

Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.

The Muslim as the new proletarian.

The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)

Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.

It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.

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

And here is another by my man Hanson, the writing machine, on the insanity of leftists.  It's on the russia, Russia, RUSSIA! hoax. To hell with these TDS-ers and their self-induced lunacy.  They don't seem to grasp that they have a moral obligation to exercise due diligence in the formation of their beliefs. That is an obligation that they regularly flout. 

There is just no moral or intellectual equivalence between Right and Left. 

Seven Causes of Civilizational Decline and Fall

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

Will Durant

Caesar and Christ, epilogue

As it went with Rome, it may well go with us. I would have no trouble giving current examples of each of Durant's seven causes. 

Perhaps an eighth should be added: the regime's provision of panem et circenses, pornography, and legalized drugs to keep the populace distracted, docile, dumbed-down, and doped-up.

I watched a few minutes of the Grammys the other night and a few minutes of the Stupor Bowl and its half-time show. It occurred to me that we have an advantage not enjoyed by Augustine: we can watch the decline and fall of a great republic on television. 

But it ain't over 'til it's over. So we fight on in the gloaming, ready for a long twilight struggle.

The Greatest Risk We are Taking

Pat Buchanan warned us six years ago.

Substack latest.

Political Pessimism (Realism?) at Townhall

Guy Benson: " 'Sanctuary' Democrats will never forgive Texas Governor Greg Abbott for forcing them to live with even a small taste of the consequences created by their reckless pro-illegal immigration posturing."

Matt Vespa: "Joe Rogan has had enough of these folks in the political discourse. It may not be shocking to the Left since any deviation from their ethos lands you in the gulag, but Mr. Rogan can no longer be affiliated with the Left."

Ann Coulter: "Third-worlders killed three Americans in Jordan over the weekend, and our political establishment is ready to start World War III. Which is more of a national security threat: terrorists 6,000 miles away, or our wide-open border?"

Kurt Schlichter: 

We don’t know what the future will bring. We don’t know what shocking events will take place between now and November, but there is one thing we can absolutely predict. Something is going to happen. Something big is going to occur that will change everything. Let’s just hope our country can survive it.

Civil War:

I called this, too, in my People’s Republic novels. The border situation is coming to a head with a potential confrontation between Governor Abbott of Texas (and 24 other governors) and our alleged President. The fact is that the Constitution requires Joe Biden to both enforce the laws and protect the states from invasion, but he is willfully doing neither. That makes for a constitutional crisis, one completely of Joe Biden’s doing, although the regime media is screaming that it’s all Texas’s fault for not meekly submitting to federal abuse and neglect. I don’t think we’re going to have another Gettysburg, but Joe Biden is a stupid, malignant man, and his administration is full of stupid, malignant people. It is entirely possible that they push this and provoke some sort of conflict. Then it gets scary. I think the great Fred Thompson said it best in “The Hunt For Red October”: “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control, and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”

Suicide by Illegal Immigration

Such suicide is what the leaders of the present-day Democrat Party promote. They are out to destroy the United States of America. It is perfectly plain that diversity is not our strength despite their asinine and oft-repeated asseverations to the contrary. Diversity sans unity = decline, downfall, disaster. 'Asinine' is exactly the right word, deriving as it does from the Latin asinus meaning donkey, the jackass being the symbol of the Democrat Party, a party once respectable, now despicable. The CPUSA couldn't win under the hammer and sickle, but are now winning in their successor incarnation under the sign of the jackass upon which is mounted the demented puppet Joey B. 

As for the useful idiots who follow the leaders, they are an ovine and bovine bunch who need to be reminded that it is not 1960 anymore. 

The graphic below is crude and I would prefer not to have to post such things, but the time for unrestricted civility is over. Civility is for the civil, not for political enemies who pose an existential threat, a threat not merely to our lives, but also to our way of life.      

 

Joe Biden: An Anti-Civilizational, Race-Baiting, Opportunist and Ignoramus

And as all of those things, a worthy representative of the contemporary hard-Left, hate-America, Democrat party. Ben Shapiro has his number:

More importantly, however, Biden's characterization of "English jurisprudential culture" as "white man's culture" is profoundly disturbing. English jurisprudential culture is rooted in the belief in the rule of law, due process of law, equal rights under law; English jurisprudential culture is responsible for preserving the natural rights we hold dear, rights which were imperfectly but increasingly extended over time to more and more human beings, particularly minorities. No less a leftist figure than Barack Obama explained just that in 2009, saying he sought a system at Guantanamo Bay that "adheres to the rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system."

Protection of individual rights -- and in particular, minority rights -- lies at the heart of English jurisprudence. Yet Biden boiled down those rights to racial privilege. And the attempt to reduce the fundamental principles of our civilization to a mask for racial hierarchical power is both false and frightening. It suggests that those principles ought to be undermined for purposes of disestablishing that supposed hierarchy. Get rid of English jurisprudential law, presumably, in order to fight racism.

Trump is Off-Putting?

Indeed he is. But he's all we've got.

A couple of Fox personalities interviewed him the other night. He kept referring to DeSantis as "DeSanctimonious."

The man has no class. This is a large part of the reason why bow-tied, yap-and-scribble Beltway conserve-nothing cuckservatives can't abide him. But class is overrated in any case and useless in a war if not positively dangerous. It would be great if the civility and grace of a Reagan could be married to the cojones of a Trump, but that can't happen due to human, all-too-human, limitations. 

In a war you need someone who is willing and able to fight, and fight to win. And he has to be electable: he has to have popular support. If you don't think Trump's the man, tell me who is.

And if you don't think the Republic is hanging by a thread, then I recommend you listen to Mark Levin's Sunday night, January 7th show with Douglas Murray and Gordon Chang. 

UPDATE (1/16/24)

Trump won Iowa with 51%: 56,260 votes. Christie brought up the rear, garnering all of 35 votes.  In other news, Bill Ackmann has dumped a cool one mil into Dean Phillips' kitty.  What I am missing, though, are the arguments against Trump. I don't see that Phillips or his pal Ackmann have given any. But then I have read only Ackman's long tweet and Phillips' annoyingly graphic and superficial website to which Ackman links. What are the arguments against the Orange Man? Trump = Hitler? Trump a cult leader? Tell that to some Iowa farmer with his pitchfork at the ready.

Where to Send Illegal Immigrants

Send them to 'sanctuary' jurisdictions.

Eric Adams, mayor of NYC, would be happy to show his hospitality and humanity. I am using 'jurisdiction' to cover cities, counties, and states.  Here is a nifty map and a list brought to you from the fine folks over at the Center for Immigration Studies. I am proud to report that no city or county in Arizona is on the list. 

Note the clustering of 'sanctuary'  counties. The nastiest such cluster appears to be in the Pacific Northwest in Washington and Oregon with an increase in the density of clustering as you 'migrate' toward the Left Coast.  

From the map, I judge that the majority of the 'sanctuary' jurisdictions are coastal with most of the 'fly-over' jurisdictions in THC-rich Colorado.

A state is composed of counties, and counties are composed of cities (towns, etc.).  Would I be wrong to infer that if a state is a 'sanctuary' state (Illinois, e.g.), that every county  in that state has the same status, and every city in every county? OR can counties and cities in a 'sanctuary' state retain non-'sanctuary' status? I don't know, which is why I am asking.

(By the way, it annoys me when I ask someone a question of the form 'Do you know why ___?' and he responds, 'Why?')

Now for a trio of polemically-intended witticisms:

There  is more of sanctimony than of sanctuary in a 'sanctuary' jurisdiction.

It is easy to be sanctimonious if you have no skin in the game.

Only the inmates of an asylum could confuse an illegal immigrant with an asylum-seeker.

Mockery is a weapon not to be sneered at in our battle with our political enemies. And throw in a little contumely for good measure.

 

America: Morning or Evening?

Morning in America

Evening in America

In the second article, Peter van Buren talks sense, but fails to list massive, intentionally promoted, illegal immigration as the threat to the Republic that it is. You may safely ignore the first article.

Crises There Will Always Be

I cite the example of Nicolai Hartmann in a Substack entry from March, 2022.

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.

We won't give up and we won't give in. We will battle the bastards that are out to destroy our Republic.  But the wise among us know that this world is a vanishing quantity and that to expend all one's energies in the defense of the fleeting finitudes of the here and now is folly. There are things worth living for that transcend the passing scene. So apportion your time accordingly.  

Annus Horribilis in Excelsis

That is what 2024 is shaping up to be. Ben Shapiro:

All of which means that 2024 is going to be the most insane and ugly presidential election in American history. And that’s saying a lot, since 1968 and 2020 are both years that existed. Under what circumstances, precisely, would Democrats accept the result of a Trump election? Under what circumstances, precisely, would Republicans accept the result of a Biden election?

The weaponization of the legal system creates an all-consuming fire, burning everything in its path. There is simply no 2024 result likely to result in anything but complete—and perhaps violent—chaos at this point.

One quibble, though. Shapiro ignores an important difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Dems, not inaptly describable as successor commies, are under party discipline: you can expect them all to toe the party line. There is no counterpart of the RINO among them. The Republicans, by contrast, are lousy with RINOs and cuckservative lapdogs of the Left.

To put it in terms of political 'circularity': the Dems circle the wagons while the Repubs favor the circular firing squad. And the Libertarians (Losertarians)? They expend themselves in the circle jerk.

Since Dementocrat scum will do anything to stop Trump, I predict that they will succeed, even if they have to 'raise' John Gotti to do so. And the Republicans, 'conservatives' who manage to conserve nothing, will acquiesce in the result and go back to writing learned articles about the Constitution and the rule of law.

Please disagree with me on this. I don't want to believe it. 

Happy New Year!

(Since some of you suffer from irony deficiency, I mean that ironically. I will be happy to explain the pun too, if that is necessary.)

2024: The Year of Reckoning

Victor Davis Hanson explains why.

Are you ready?  Or are you a pollyanna like the foolish Israeli woman who didn't see or want to see what was coming and easily predictable?

Ruling Class Banana Republicans

Rod Dreher.  Includes this nifty graphic from an IBM DEI indoctrination session:

Rod Dreher on Bergoglio's Latest Termitic Outrage

Decline and fall is the way of the world. It's our turn now as institution after institution is captured by wokeassery and termitry. Sodomy in the Senate and among prelates. The presidency of a 'wokified' but unqualified plagiarist at Harvard. The huge numbers of destructive leftists and their usefully idiotic fellow travellers who support a demented traitor in plain dereliction of duty for POTUS.  And that just for a start. Is consolation to be had? Well, the religionist can look beyond the passing scene, and the philosopher can take comfort in the thought that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.

Here is Hegel in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to  The Philosophy of Right:

When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old.  By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom.  And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols.  The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, and wisdom arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.

When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey.  The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Grey, dear friend, is all theory
And green the golden tree of life.

Dreher's piece is long but good. I've been called a writing machine but I can't hold a candle to Dreher in terms of sheer output. There is one thing I can't stomach about him, though: his mindless anti-Trumpery. But we all have our follies, fatuities, failings, and blind spots. 

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

This is a redacted repost from 21 June 2015. In the subsequent eight years, we in the West are 'infinitely' worse off than before.  Time to re-visit the topic and re-assess. Mournful was the tocsin Malcolm Pollack sounded in 2015; what must its sound be today?

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

Malcolm laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or, to invoke an even more appropriate analogy from physics, jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you would-be owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list, and about the items that must now be added to the 2015 list such as the erasure of our national borders, the destruction of our memorial statuary, the institution of Sino-styled surveillance, 'lawfare,' the trashing of the Constitution and the rule of law, et cetera ad nauseam.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the 18th century Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  Mythos gave way to logos. (Ernst Cassirer is well-worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is the motor of scientia.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and traditional narratives  that had been passed on from time immemorial, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense, and tribal tales of who smote whom and when, where and why.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its driver, is therefore good.

Skepsis can be but need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a commitment to Reason and its power Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot. There can be no doubt that the human lot has been immeasurably improved by the scientific advances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, advances made possible in large part by a deep questioning of traditional teachings (Aristotle in the main) and traditional authorities (the Roman church, for example). 

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses and interprets their deliverances by rational canons.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the evidence or certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it one-sided to accentuate the negative while ignoring the positive.   The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically, and put it to the test empirically as Galileo did with various Aristotelian dogmas.  Doubt is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  Is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypothesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does this doctrine function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving power and influence by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is also Janus-faced, and bears a diabolical aspect.  Lucifer the light-bearer became drunk on his own power and was blinded by his own light. He would not obey.  He would not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind was not one for minding any antecedent reality.  He would not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."  

I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. (This is why Sharia-supporting Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to the West.) And the same goes for keeping in check communism, wokery, and theocracy. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.  Athens needs Jerusalem as Jerusalem needs Athens.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Kant's "Copernican revolution" came before conceptual relativism, but Kant was  not a conceptual relativist.  One has to beware of the history-of-ideas post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Enlightenment came before our current malaise and cultural sickness-unto-death, but it will take a lot of arguing to make a plausible case that the former 'paved the way' for the latter, let alone made the latter inevitable a term Malcolm uses above. 

This is a redacted repost from 21 June 2015. In the subsequent eight years, we in the West are 'infinitely' worse off than before.  Time to re-visit the topic and re-assess. Mournful was the tocsin Malcolm Pollack sounded in 2015; what must its sound be today?

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

Malcolm laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or, to invoke an even more appropriate analogy from physics, jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you would-be owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list, and about the items that must now be added to the 2015 list such as the erasure of our national borders, the destruction of our memorial statuary, the institution of Sino-styled surveillance, 'lawfare,' the trashing of the Constitution and the rule of law, et cetera ad nauseam.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the 18th century Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  Mythos gave way to logos. (Ernst Cassirer is well-worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is the motor of scientia.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and traditional narratives  that had been passed on from time immemorial, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense, and tribal tales of who smote whom and when, where and why.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its driver, is therefore good.

Skepsis can be but need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a commitment to Reason and its power Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot. There can be no doubt that the human lot has been immeasurably improved by the scientific advances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, advances made possible in large part by a deep questioning of traditional teachings (Aristotle in the main) and traditional authorities (the Roman church, for example). 

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses and interprets their deliverances by rational canons.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the evidence or certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it one-sided to accentuate the negative while ignoring the positive.   The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically, and put it to the test empirically as Galileo did with various Aristotelian dogmas.  Doubt is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  Is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypothesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does this doctrine function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving power and influence by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is also Janus-faced, and bears a diabolical aspect.  Lucifer the light-bearer became drunk on his own power and was blinded by his own light. He would not obey.  He would not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind was not one for minding any antecedent reality.  He would not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."  

I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. (This is why Sharia-supporting Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to the West.) And the same goes for keeping in check communism, wokery, and theocracy. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.  Athens needs Jerusalem as Jerusalem needs Athens.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Kant's "Copernican revolution" came before conceptual relativism, but Kant was  not a conceptual relativist.  One has to beware of the history-of-ideas post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Enlightenment came before our current malaise and cultural sickness-unto-death, but it will take a lot of arguing to make a plausible case that the former 'paved the way' for the latter, let alone made the latter inevitable a term Malcolm uses above. 

This is a redacted repost from 21 June 2015. In the subsequent eight years, we in the West are 'infinitely' worse off than before.  Time to re-visit the topic and re-assess. Mournful was the tocsin Malcolm Pollack sounded in 2015; what must its sound be today?

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

Malcolm laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or, to invoke an even more appropriate analogy from physics, jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you would-be owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list, and about the items that must now be added to the 2015 list such as the erasure of our national borders, the destruction of our memorial statuary, the institution of Sino-styled surveillance, 'lawfare,' the trashing of the Constitution and the rule of law, et cetera ad nauseam.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the 18th century Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  Mythos gave way to logos. (Ernst Cassirer is well-worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is the motor of scientia.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and traditional narratives  that had been passed on from time immemorial, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense, and tribal tales of who smote whom and when, where and why.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its driver, is therefore good.

Skepsis can be but need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a commitment to Reason and its power Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot. There can be no doubt that the human lot has been immeasurably improved by the scientific advances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, advances made possible in large part by a deep questioning of traditional teachings (Aristotle in the main) and traditional authorities (the Roman church, for example). 

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses and interprets their deliverances by rational canons.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the evidence or certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it one-sided to accentuate the negative while ignoring the positive.   The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically, and put it to the test empirically as Galileo did with various Aristotelian dogmas.  Doubt is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  Is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypothesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does this doctrine function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving power and influence by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is also Janus-faced, and bears a diabolical aspect.  Lucifer the light-bearer became drunk on his own power and was blinded by his own light. He would not obey.  He would not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind was not one for minding any antecedent reality.  He would not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."  

I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. (This is why Sharia-supporting Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to the West.) And the same goes for keeping in check communism, wokery, and theocracy. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.  Athens needs Jerusalem as Jerusalem needs Athens.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Kant's "Copernican revolution" came before conceptual relativism, but Kant was  not a conceptual relativist.  One has to beware of the history-of-ideas post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Enlightenment came before our current malaise and cultural sickness-unto-death, but it will take a lot of arguing to make a plausible case that the former 'paved the way' for the latter, let alone made the latter inevitable a term Malcolm uses above. 

The 'Reel' Truth about George Floyd

Here

Tony Flood chimes in:

Jesse's interview with Liz Collins: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6341513639112

Jesse's excerpt from Collin's new documentary The Fall of Minneapolis: https://www.foxnews.com/media/jesse-watters-george-floyd-story-very-different-depending-on-who-you-talk-to

 

Here's the book the film is based on: https://www.amazon.com/Theyre-Lying-Media-Death-George/dp/B0BKS611C6/

 

When Crump, Floyd's attorney, said his client was a healthy man, he lied (or didn't know what he was talking about, take your pick).

 

20 deaths, $2 billion in damages, and massive social proof that leftists can do what they want, when they want (even during COVID lockdown), and the media will cover for them, as we're seeing in mass support for Hamas.

 

No republic can long last that honors  individuals such as Floyd and dishonors the great men that built it.  I'm taking bets: how long can we last under Dementocrat rule?  How long until the collapse of civil order? Two years, three? What say you, Tony?