Maverick Philosopher

A Classicist Misanthrope Opens a Bar . . .

. . . and names it: Margaritas Ante Porcos.

Son of 'in case you missed it'

Down with a bad case of TDS? Check with your doctor to see if Independence is right for you.

Kamala as Zelig

Do you remember Zelig? If Zelig was the human chameleon, Kamala Harris is the political chameleon.

Official Trailer #1

Mia Farrow as Kamala

Who is Kamala Harris?  The Language Nazi cannot resist pointing our that the author of the linked piece confuses 'errant' with 'arrant' about five paragraphs down.

No Entity without Identity

Some political wit in the Alinskyite style is the Stack topper of the day. 

'Woke' Home Defense

Helpful tips. About three minutes long.

But wait, there's more: a case for pre-natal squatters' rights.

The Left's Orwellianism Pictorially Represented

W

Not the Least of Bergoglio's Sins

He's destroyed the reply, "Is the Pope Catholic?"

Hurricane Hilary is Misnamed!

Disasters should be named after disasters. The name should be Hillary.

Sunset Crater

Better the Visitor's Center than Flagstaff!

 

A Homosexual Platonist Walks into a Gay Bar . . .

. . . looking depressed.

'Tender: Whatsamatta you?

Platonist: A Third Man has come between between me and my partner!

A Nominalist Walks into a Bar . . .

. . . looking sad.

Bartender: "What's the matter, pal?"

"My girlfriend says we have nothing in common!"

Bartender: "But you are a nominalist! Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?"

This short video is sloppy, but will give you some idea of what nominalism is if you don't have a clue.

DEI and Crash Dummies

DIVERSITY demands that crash dummies be of all sizes, shapes, races, ethnicities, animal species including trans-species hybrids such as the Cat Man, and also 'genders' including trans-dummies, and let's not exclude living humans who 'identify' as crash dummies the better to facilitate their exit from life's freeway. 

EQUITY will then be served: an equal outcome will be achieved by all dummies including the dumb-assed Dems who 'identify' as inanimate dummies when they are 'merely' transgressive leftards.

INCLUSION rules out, or excludes, all conservatives from serving as crash dummies, and rules in all fat, ugly, 'vertically challenged,' and 'differently abled' persons especially such politicians as Lori Lightfoot and John Fetterman.

What am I mocking?

A New Budweiser Joke

One of the old ones goes like this. "Ah had me a coupla Buds, but ahm none the wiser."  I suggest as part of the punch back against the Anheuser-Busch Dylan Mulvaney wokery, the following:

I had me a couple of Buds and my schlong's no longer a riser.

But I am sure you can do better than that; combox open.

The logically prior question, of course, is why anyone of taste and discernment would drink the swill served up by Anheuser-Busch when you can drink some such fine German brew as St. Pauli Girl the poster 'boy' of which is a buxom wench (in sense 1) who is not only unambiguously female but also stacked and packed to the nines and hence in violation of all  canons of wokery known to man.

If your head is screwed on Right, you will enjoy DeSantis' take on this brew-haha (I'm punning on brouhaha, as I'm sure you've noticed.)

Time to man up and bone up on your political ponerology the better to punch back against the 'woke' kakistocracy and all its works. Not much is at stake, of course, except the survival of civilization.

 

 

Bars Philosophers Opened after being Denied Tenure

HT: Allan Jackson:

Beer and Trembling

Gin and Platonic

Phenomenology of Spirits

Martini Heidegger

Bellini and Nothingness

Jean-Jacques & Coke

Vodka on the Lockes

Maker’s Marx Old Fashioned.

To this list I add:

 

Rusty Nagel's. (If you got that, I will buy you the cocktail to which I am alluding.)

 

Continuing in the humorous vein, Allan offers:

 

Heraclitus walks into a bar.

Bartender: Oh...You again?

 

I counteroffer:

 

Zeno tries to walk into a bar.

 

Russell never walks into bars, he is only on occasion at bar-proximal places at bar-open times.

 

McTaggart, however, has no time for bars at all.

 

Van Inwagen doesn't believe in bars, but only in bottles and bricks arranged barwise.

 

Jon Barwise was not available for comment.

On 'Stuff' and 'Ass'

A Substack language rant. Excerpt:

'Ass' is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will 'ass' become an all-purpose synecdoche? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl's father for her ass in marriage? In the expression, 'piece of ass' the reference is not to the buttocks proper, but to an adjoining area. 'Ass' appears subject to a peculiar semantic spread. It can come to mean almost anything, as in 'haul ass,' which means to travel at a high rate of speed. I don't imagine that if one were hauling donkeys one could make very good time. So how on earth did this expression arise? (I had teenage friends who could not refer to a U-Haul trailer except as a U-Haul-Ass trailer.)

Face Masks

Masks are a form of cultural appropriation. We have no right to adopt the apparel of criminals, thereby disrespecting by co-opting the accoutrement of their chosen lifestyle.  That lifestyle is who they are!  But not only that. Since criminals are disproportionately black, masks are also racist! 

Masks are also discriminatory and non-inclusive. Doesn't every pathogen have a right to migrate whithersoever it wants?  Nancy Pelosi, that shining star of political wisdom, taught us that walls are immoral using those very words; how then could masks be any less immoral? 

Kamala Harris on the Passage of Time

We here at Maverick Philosopher are classically liberal in our openness to a variety of points of view on the enduring questions of philosophy.  As long-time readers know, one of our mottoes is Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus. "We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us."* 

In that spirit, we offer the profound thoughts of the Vice President, thoughts that rival in depth those of Aurelius Augustinus and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, and that push the philosophy of time in a new direction and away from the notorious B-theory of time much loved by previous Veeps.

I will leave the reader to decide whether Kamala's insights reach the level of those proffered by President Bill Clinton some years ago when he breathed new life into philosophical logic with his penetrating observation that matters of great moment  often ride on what the meaning of 'is' is. 

___________________

*The motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be  foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form:  Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Our motto is based on this variant.  Horace Jeffery Hodges informs me of a Satanic variant to be found in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." (I am Satan, and nothing human is foreign to me.) 

A Pronoun Puzzle: "He who hesitates is lost"

Grammatically, 'he' is a pronoun. Pronouns have antecedents. What is the antecedent of 'he' in the folk saying supra? It does not have one. 

A Yogi Berra type joke is in the offing. We're hiking. We must go forward; we can't go back. But the path forward is perilous and requires a bold step over an abysmal chasm. I say, "He who hesitates is lost!" My hiking partner, a smartass, replies, "You mean Biden?"

My witticism is modelled on a genuine Yogi Berra joke. You are asked what time it is and you reply, "You mean now?"

'He' in the folk saying is grammatically a pronoun, but it does not function logically as one. How then does it function?

I say it functions as a universal quantifier. Not like a universal quantifier, but as one. Thus:

For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

This strikes me as clear as day. Rather less clear is the role of the first-person singular pronoun in 'I think, therefore I am.'  Does 'I' in this context have an antecedent, and if it does, what or who is the antecedent?   Anythng you say will land you in the aporetic frying pan. Or so I could argue.

Later.

An Old Descartes Joke

In the fall of 1989 a female student at Case Western Reserve University told me the following Descartes joke.

Our man stops at a bar, the 'tender asks whether he wants a drink, Descartes says, "I think not, then disappears. I replied, pedantically, "I think therefore I am" is not logically equivalent to "I think not therefore I am not" any more than "I am walking therefore I am moving" is logically equivalent to "I am not walking therefore I am not moving." So the joke rests on a logical mistake.

But this is true of many if not most jokes.  I have toyed with the notion that most humor stems from logico-conceptual incoherence of one sort or another, ambiguity, amphiboly, equivocation and various formal mistakes.   Another example is Yogi Berra's "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."  Or:  "Who was that lady I saw you with last night?  That was no lady, that was my wife!"  Or:  "I see you got a haircut.  No, I got 'em all cut."

Colander Girl

With apologies to Neil Sedaka, Calendar Girl. 

A 'pastafarian' idiot was allowed to wear a colander in an official DMV photo in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Bring on the hoodies, the sombreros, the ski masks . . . .  Story here.

Does this have anything to do with the decline of the West?  Something.  It is just another little indication of the abdication of those in positions of authority.  A driver's license is an important document.  The authorities should not allow its being mocked by a dumbass with a piece of kitchenware on her head.  But Massachusetts is lousy with liberals, so what do you expect?  A liberal will tolerate anything except common sense and good judgment.

A penne for her thoughts as she strains to find something to believe in.  If only she would use her noodle.

Who is Caius?

Robert Paul Wolff here replies with wit and lefty snark to a charming request by one Pamela N., a personal assistant, who wants to know who Immanuel Kant is referring to when he writes, "Caius is a man; man is mortal; therefore, Caius is mortal."  Pamela confesses,

I will admit, I have not read Kant's works. I have, however, spent the last couple of hours combing through post after post after post about this particular quote from the book and cannot find a single soul who would say who they think Caius is.

In reading these many posts, I have come to the conclusion that Kant is probably referring to Pope Caius as he has been venerated by the Catholic Church as a Saint. Given that title, and the fact that Saint's [sic] are given to [sic] a quasi-immortal status [sic], I have ascertained that this is who Kant is most likely referring to. My question for you is, do you think that my assumption is correct? or do you have a deeper insight into who he is referring to?

Principles of Jewish Buddhism

Here

The Double Bongcloud

Don't try this at home!

Comic Relief

It is no joke what the Left is doing to our country, but on the lighter side, Dementia Joe's attempts to speak English provide some comic relief as the White House turns into an assisted living facility.

Wanted Dead and Alive

So True, Hillary!

Environmental Racism!

The other night we heard Elizabeth Warren speak of various forms of racism, including 'environmental racism.' Bear with me as I try to figure out what this might be.

An industrial polluter dumps chemicals into a river. Now rivers come in colors. Anything that has a color, however, has a race. After all, race = color. So rivers are of various races. Now the river in question that the capitalist dog sullies is a River of Color. The rapids portion of the river is of course white and therefore white supremacist; but that doesn't count since the portion of the river where the pollutants enter is brown. So what we have here is a River of Color being maltreated by a white supremacist capitalist dog.

Here, then, is a clear case of environmental racism.

Alles klar?

Addendum

Another important question is whether any river is an illegal alien. Could a river change its course in such a way as to violate the territorial sovereignty of the USA, say? The Rio Grande perhaps? Would such a river become an illegal alien river? Presumably it would. And given the leftist conflation of illegal aliens with Hispanics, would such a river be rightly deemed an Hispanic river eligible for certain perquisites and privileges such as 'free' health care? Polluted rivers need health care; to withhold such care from an Hispanic river would be racist!  We need to have a 'conversation' about this.

Archeologists Discover Long Sought-After Racist Bone

On Tuesday, in a region of Arizona once known for its Neolithic settlements, a prominent archeology team made a historic discovery when it unearthed a frequently referenced and formerly elusive racist bone (ulnis bigotris).

And you thought that "He doesn't have a racist bone in his body" was just a manner of speaking?

Story here.

Dennis Miller on Obama, and the Art of the Verbal Counterpunch

(This is a repost, slightly redacted, from 9 October 2014.)

Last night on The O'Reilly Factor, the sharpest comedian out there uncorked the following:

He makes Narcissus look like he invented self-effacement.

In battling the Left, it is not enough to have facts, logic, and moral decency on one's side; one must turn the Left's Alinskyite tactics against them by the use of mockery, derision, contumely, and all the weapons of invective to make them look stupid, contemptible, and uncool.

For the young especially, the cool counts for far more than the cogent. 

This is why the quintessentially cool Miller is so effective.  People of sense could see from the outset that the adjunct law professor and community organizer, associate of  former terrorist Bill Ayers and the 'reverend' Jeremiah Wright, raised on leftist claptrap and bereft of experience and knowledge of the world, would prove to be a disaster as president -- as he has so proven, and as even Leon Panetta the other night all but admitted. 

But Obama came across as one cool dude and that endeared him to foolish voters. 

Civility is a prized conservative virtue, and one wishes that such verbal tactics would not be necessary.  But for leftists politics is war, and it is the foolish conservative who fails to see this and persists in imagining it to be a gentlemanly debate on common ground over shared interests.  Civility is for the civil, not for its enemies.

Some time ago I heard Miller quip, in reference to Melissa Harris-Perry, that

She is a waste of a good hyphen.

A nasty thing to say, no doubt, but not as nasty as the slanderous and delusional things she had to say about the supposedly racist overtones of the word 'Obamacare.'

Conservatives should not allow themselves to be hobbled by their own civility and high standards.  As one of my aphorisms has it:

Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.

And I don't mean that merely on the verbal level.

Overheard at the Philosopher's Shooting Range

"Treat every gun as if it is loaded in every metaphysically possible world in which it exists."

Overheard in the Fitting Room

40 in Roman numerals is XL.

Are You Indecisive?

I can't decide.

Word of the Day: Witzelsucht

Punning mania. 

Humor Video: Hitler Reacts to Kavanaugh Confirmation

1:55

No Entity Without Identity

Could it be literally true that Trump = Hitler?  Why not?

Lefties might try tampering with the concept of identity. They might advance the notion that identity, although long held by reactionary racists to be a symmetrical relation, is really asymmetrical. Thus, if a = b, then it is not the case that b = a. That would allow them to say that while Trump is Hitler, Hitler is not Trump.

But they can't leave transitivity untouched. After all, David Axelrod recently claimed that Trump is literally (his word) Nero.  Axelrod is no Joe Biden.  Axe knows the difference between the literal and the figurative, unlike Joe Blow. So if Trump = Hitler, and Trump = Nero, then Hitler = Nero, which is a decidedly anachronistic result. Hey hey, ho ho, transitivity has got to go! (Along with Western Civ as recommended by Brother Jesse.)

What about reflexivity?  Is Obama Obama?  Not really. He celebrates diversity even unto self-diversity.  It is precisely his self-diversity as both a white man and a black man that made it possible for him to bring us all together as he did so wonderfully while saving us from the capitalist oppression of the Law of Identity.

So I'm thinking that the Democrat Party needs a Logic Caucus tasked with undoing the racist logic of dead white guys like Aristotle and Frege.

It stands to reason that the Identity Politics of the Dems calls for a radical re-thinking of the very concept of identity.

I hereby nominate Nancy Pelosi, the sharpest knife in the Democrat drawer, to head up the Logic Caucus.

From a Style Sheet

The passive voice is always to be avoided.

Dear Abby

Dear Abby,

 

My husband hasn't worked for the last 14 years. All he does is get dressed in the morning

and hop in his fancy car to visit his cronies. I know he's cheated on me many times with

young girls who could be his granddaughters.   I know this because he brags about this to me.

 

He smokes fancy cigars and drinks the most expensive liquor day and night.

 

We sleep in separate beds because he tells me he knows I`m a lesbian and besides that,

my varicose veins and fat behind turn him off.

 

Should I clobber him with something heavy, or should I just leave him ?

 

Your advice would be appreciated.

 

Sincerely,

 

Mad as Hell

 

 

Dear Mad as Hell,

 

You don`t have to take that kind of treatment from any man. I suggest you pack your bags and move out a.s.a.p.!

 

Don`t resort to violence and try to act more like a lady.

 

Remember, you were almost elected President of the United States, so try acting like one.

 

Abby

What Should a Merger of Dissent and Commentary be Called?

Answer by Woody Allen in a 35 second excerpt from Annie Hall.

Rodney Dangerfield

Funny as hell. Trigger Warning! Not for the Pee Cee.

Is Life Worth Living?

 

 

Better Latte . . .

. . . than nero.

(Is this racist code?  A 'dog whistle'? Or is it just a bad pun consequent upon a deployment in an e-mail of the phrase, 'better late than never'?)

Related articles

'Anglo-American' a 'Dog Whistle'?

Dog Whistling for the Stupid

Dick Durbin: Race-Baiting Hypocrite

The Anti-Trump Recoil Goes Too Far

Copy Editor Makes Me Out to be a Disease

Dear Dr. Varicella:

 

Attached you will find two PDFs: a copyedited version of your manuscript and a version indicating changes to the original file. This is your final opportunity to make any clarifications or stylistic changes to the manuscript.

An honest mistake, no doubt, so I won't reveal the names of the editor or the journal.  But it is a little ironic that a copy editor would make such a mistake.  But it's tough being an editor.  It's a lousy job.  So I want to thank all of the editors out there without whom those of us who publish  would not see our words in print.

 

The only thing that really gets my goat is political correctness in a copy editor. I vent my spleen in The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor and Copy Editors and Political Correctness.

 

Let me end with a bit of praise for the tribe of bloggers.

 

Most people 'massacre' my name and it "pisses me off" in the phraseology of Jeff Dunham's Walter; but bloggers almost universally get it right.  No surprise, I suppose:  bloggers are an elite group of highly literate natural-born scribblers.

Dark Matter Matters!

If someone asserts that dark matter matters, you should respond:

ALL matter matters, including prime matter!

Pedantry in Pursuit of Precision . . .

. . . is at worst a peccadillo. Philosophers place a premium on precision. Get used to it.

Friday Cat Blogging Three Days Late: A Puzzling Image

When I travelled in China, I saw not one pussy cat. But I had a Chinese student at CWRU who said that the Chinese eat anything with four legs except the kitchen table. And now I recall eating something in Wuhan that tasted like chicken but a tad gamier. Now North Korea is not China. But I understand there's a lot of hungry people in the Land of Little Rocket Man. That suggests that the following image is fake:

Chess Players Commiserate on their Failed Marriages

A: "We were bishops of opposite color." 

B:  "Sorry to hear that.  In our case the union ended when she discovered I had insufficient mating material."

C:  "We just couldn't get it together.  Whenever she wanted to make love, I was busy making Luft."

D: "She blew her stack when I gingerly brought up the topic of back-rank mate."

E. "She got tired of my excuses,  especially 'Sorry, honey, not tonight. After a hard day at the office I'm weaker than f7.'"

F. "The bitch had a way of putting me in psychological Zugzwang: no matter what I said or did, I only dug my hole deeper."

G. "In bed one night she called me a perv when I muttered something about the Lucena position. 

H. "Her frigidity did us in.  She'd allow a check but never a mate."

I.  "She said  I lacked ambition citing my penchant for underpromotion."

J.  "We fought like knights and bishops."

How a Leftist Gains Perspective

Here:

Yet even as [Lisa] Bloom was still coming to terms with the [Weinsteinian] events of the past month — she attended the post-Burning Man gathering L.A. Decompression over the weekend in an attempt to gain perspective— she seemed focused on some of the smaller details of what went wrong.

Be careful not to bust your gut laughing.

Lefties are risible in both senses of the word: like all human beings, they have the ability to laugh, but unlike most human beings, they are appropriately laughed at.

Related articles

Burning Man attendee dies after rushing into festival flames

Jewish Humor

Here:

Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altmann,” said his secretary, “I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew ?”

“On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know – it makes me feel a whole lot better!”

I'm a Racist Because I Like Chess

I left the house at 5:15 this morning, hiked 45 minutes over the local hills to arrive at 6:00 sharp at Gecko Espresso where I met up with Lowell S. a local chess aficionado.  We played under the influence of caffeine for a solid two hours, one game, recorded, to be analyzed when next we meet. I checkmated the old man. 

Chess is a delightful game, especially when you win. An oasis of sanity in an insane world. But we must admit that it is a deeply racist game and that all who play it are racists. The following excerpt from a cognate post explains why.

Another proof that chess is racist and oppressive and ought to be banned is that blacks are woefully under-represented among its players. This evil can have only one explanation: racist suppression of black players. For everyone knows that blacks as a group are the equals of whites as a group in respect of intelligence, interest in chess, and the sorts of virtues needed to play the undemocratic and reactionary 'Royal Game.' Among these are the ability to study hard, defer gratification, and keep calm in trying situations.

For these and many other reasons, we must DEMAND that chess be banned.

We must manifest solidarity with our oppressed Taliban brothers who have maintained, truly, that chess is an evil game of chance.

If Narcissus Had a Blog . . .

. . . what would it be called?

Facebook.