Maverick Philosopher

Andrew Sullivan on Critical Race Theory

Sullivan writes,

Here is how critical theory defines itself in one of its central documents. It questions the very foundations of “Enlightenment rationality, legal equality and Constitutional neutrality.” It begins with the assertion that these are not ways to further knowledge and enlarge human freedom. They are rather manifestations of white power over non-white bodies. Formal legal equality, they argue, the promise of the American experiment, has never been actual equality, even as, over the centuries, it has been extended to everyone. It is, rather, a system to perpetuate inequality forever, which is the single and only reason racial inequality is still here.

This is pernicious nonsense. Why has "formal legal equality" never led to "actual equality"? Why hasn't equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and the like led to equality of outcome or result? Because, as a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically.  By no empirical measure are people equal either as individuals or as groups.   We are naturally unequal.    And because there is no natural equality, it is no surprise that there is no racial equality of outcome.  Since there is no "white power over non-white bodies," this nonexistent factor cannot be used to explain racially inequality of outcome or result.  Sullivan continues his description of CRT:

Critical Race Theory Attracts the Uncritical

People are suckers for Critical Race Theory (CRT) because they cannot think critically.

A key word in the CRT arsenal is 'equity.'  ('Arsenal' is the right word given the Left's weaponization of language.) It is an Unbegriff, an unconcept. It combines something good with something unattainable except by the toleration of grave evils. Let me explain.

'Equity' sounds good and so people are thoughtlessly for it. It is like 'social justice' in this respect. They don't realize that leftists, semantic distortionists nonpareil,  have hijacked a legitimate word so as to make it  refer to equality of outcome. Being uncritical, people don't appreciate that there is an important  difference between equality in its formal senses -- equality before the law, equality of opportunity, equality in respect of political/civil rights, etc. -- and equality of outcome or result. Formal equality is an attainable good. Material equality is unattainable because of group differences.  To achieve material or non-formal equality, equality of outcome, the means employed would be worse than the supposed cure.

Given undeniable group differences, 'equity' does not naturally arise; hence the only way to achieve 'equity' is by unjustly taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive.  The levellers would divest the makers of what is rightfully theirs to benefit the undeserving takers. 'Equity' is unjust!  It is unjust to deny a super-smart Asian or Jew a place in an MIT engineering program because of a racial/ethnic quota.  Judging candidates by merit and achievement, however, naturally leads to the disproportional representation of Asians and Jews in such programs. That is a consequence that must be accepted. Candidates must be judged as individuals and not as members of groups.  Indeed, the superior black must take precedence over the inferior Asian or white, but not because he is black, but because he is superior. 

Suppose you disagree. Then I argue as follows.

The state apparatus needed to bring about this 'equitization' or equalization of outcomes is vastly larger than the one permitted by our founding documents.  The attempt to achieve it brings us closer and closer to an omni-invasive totalitarian police state.  That would be worse than a situation in which natural hierarchies are respected.

In any case, natural hierarchies always have the last word. If the USA weakens itself by going 'woke,' it will become easy prey for its foreign enemies.  Their dictators are salivating as we speak. Never forget that states are in the state of nature with respect to one another, and that nature is red in tooth and claw. A 'woke' military is a weak military. 

The paradox should not be missed: the equalization project requires agencies of equalization vastly more powerful that the groups they seek to equalize.  The upshot, then, is not equality of power and position but a situation of material inequality in which the governors oppress the governed.

Is CRT a theory?  A commenter on my Facebook page correctly notes that

The advocates of the current re-education program are not presenting a theory but rather requiring their victims to signal their uncritical, obsequious acceptance of a canon of dogmas. Calling a dogma or set of dogmas a theory is a rhetorical ruse used to disguise their insidious indoctrination with the a veneer of real educational activity.

My commenter is right. CRT is not a theory to be discussed and tested but a set of dogmas to be imposed on children of all ages whose critical faculties are no match for the indoctrination.

The Fix We Are In: How Should We Respond to the 'Woke' Revolutionaries?

The difference between paleo-liberal and post-liberal responses to the 'woke' Left is well described in a recent Substack entry White tribalism is a third response. I have been entertaining (with some hospitality) the notion that whites may need to go tribal pro tempore, for the time being, in order to defend themselves and their interests (which are not just their interests but the interests of civilization and high culture) against the various tribalisms promoted by the Left. Call it Tribalism Pro Tem.

 

But so far my 'official' position on this weblog and elsewhere  would fall under the paleo-liberal or classically liberal rubric. As I see it, a sound conservatism, American conservatism I call it, takes on board what is good in classical liberalism.  Against Deneen, whose position is limned in the above-linked Substack piece by N. S. Lyons, I would object that there is no inevitability to the slide from the classical liberalism of the Founders, which was respectful of traditions, to a society of atomized, deracinated individuals. I suspect that Deneen succumbs to the classic slippery slope fallacy.

 

This just over the transom from a reader:

A question for you:  It seems like I'm one of the alt-right "tribalists" you take yourself to disagree with.  (Correct me if I'm wrong.)  But do we really disagree?  Let me try to clarify my position a little.

 

I'd be very happy to live in a society where race and other tribal markers don't matter much.  They could be a purely personal or social kind of thing with no political meaning.

 

On the other hand, when I look around and see how non-white (etc.) tribalism is being weaponized against white people, and specifically white-Euro-Christian men, it seems to me that we have no practical​ option other than consciously identifying as the tribe under attack.  It's largely a defensive thing.  We are being attacked as​ white people, or white men, so it's not enough to just call ourselves "Americans" or "Canadians" or whatever.  Those civic identities have already been deconstructed or rejected by the people who hate us and seek power over us.  They just don't care.  And others like us are not going to be motivated by appeals to these more abstract categories when their enemies are attacking them for being white, and male.

 

So it's in this (weird) context that I think white men should be conscious and proud of their "tribal" identity, as a healthy and empowering response to the hateful tribalism of others.  In a different context I wouldn't advocate this kind of tribalism.  Against a society that says it's shameful and immoral to be a white man--which, let's be frank, is what they're really saying--we should affirm that there's nothing wrong with us, that we like ourselves and won't apologize for being who we are.

 

Do you disagree?

I agree with qualifications, caveats, and codicils.

 

I can't see that a white-tribal or white-male-tribal response to the pernicious tribalisms promoted by the Left is a good solution in the long run.  But in the short run I see no acceptable alternative to a pro tempore white tribalism.  So I don't disagree with my reader on the practical plane. But as a theist and a personalist, I consider a self-identification as a member of a tribe to be a false self-identification.  I am not just an animal of a particular sex and race, and because I am not just that, any self-identification as just that is a false self-identification.  I am more than that.  And I would add that my life-project is to realize that 'more' and to achieve individuation as a person. This individuation is not a given but a task. It is a spiritual task.  This is an existentialist motif expressed in a neo-Kantian way. But this is not the place to expatiate further on this theme.

 

Who am I ultimately? Just a token of a type? Just an interchangeable member of a particular tribe of animals? You wouldn't have to be a theist to reject this sort of crude self-identification. One could take oneself to be zoon logikon in Aristotle's sense, a rational animal.  One could reject God and the soul and still achieve a loftier self-apperception than that of a bit of the Earth's fauna determined by the biological categories of race and sex.  Now I accept the biological reality of race and sex: they are not social constructs. 'Society' -- whatever that is -- did not 'assign' me my male sex upon birth. The very notion is absurd. Nor did any group. Nor can I interpret myself as black or female and thereby bring about a change of race or sex.  Race and sex are neither social constructs nor personal constructs. My reality is logically and ontologically antecedent to my self-understanding. Indeed, I am essentially (as opposed to accidentally) Caucasian and male. An essential (accidental) property of a thing is a property that thing cannot (can) exist without.

 

My interlocutor will probably feel that I am sidestepping the pressing, practical issue by raising the questions that most deeply interest me, namely, those about the metaphysics of the self.  He will remind me that I am no Boethius and would have a very hard time investigating the metaphysics of the self in the gulag or under torture. And he would be right to so remind me.

 

Suppose a black guy gets in my face and attacks my whiteness and all of its values and virtues (objectivity, punctuality, self-control, ability to defer gratification, love of learning, etc.) I will point out that his smart phone would not exist if it were not for the cultural goods  produced in the West and the values and virtues just listed.   I will point out that no high culture at the level of the West came out of sub-Saharan Africa.  I will point out his ingratitude at the thousands that died in the U.S. Civil War to free the slaves. I will remind him that slavery existed on the continent of North America long before the Unites States of America came into existence, and that the moral and philosophical foundations of this polity made possible the elimination of slavery.

 

And so I would do something I would prefer not to do, namely stick up for the white tribe.  And I would do it as long as I had to do it. I would play the role part-time of the pro tem white tribalist. But at the same time that I was playing this role out of a necessity imposed on me ab extra, I would not forget who I am really am.  And who is that? Well, there are several options the exploration of which does not belong here.  But let me just note that if you are a classical theist you will not take yourself to be identical to an animal slated for utter destruction in a few years determined by your biology.

 

One more point which I think is very important. I wrote above of whiteness and its values and virtues. But we whites do not own these virtues and values any more than we own the truths of mathematics and natural science. They are universal and belong to all. It is just that whites have proven to be so much better at their discovery, articulation, dissemination, and so much better at living in accordance with them and reaping the benefits from such living.  If blacks want to improve their lives, they will have to engage in some serious cultural appropriation, which is not really cultural appropriation given the universality of the virtues and values.  They will have to order their lives along the lines of the 'white' virtues and values that they foolishly denigrate. 

On the Academentia Front: You Have to Read This

Bari Weiss:

If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)

Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:

Could I Pass an Ideological Turing Test?

On 11 January 2017 I wrote a post that begins:

Could I present liberal-left ideas in such a way that the reader could not tell that I was not a liberal?  Let me take a stab at this with respect to a few 'hot' topics.  This won't be easy.  I will have to present liberal-left ideas as plausible while avoiding all mention of their flaws.  And all of this without sarcasm, parody, or irony.  Each of these subheadings could be expanded into a separate essay.  And of course there are many more subheadings that could be added.  

The post attracted some very good comments. The consensus was that I flunked.  

Four years have past since I made that entry. That is a long time in this age of social, political, and technological hyperkineticism. If I were to rewrite it today it would have to reflect the increasingly delusional quality of leftist 'thought' as we jerk, not merely accelerate, toward our cultural collapse. 

Jerk?

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating.  But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking.  After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven.  No need to name names.  You know who they are.

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration.  Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk.  (I am not joking; look it up.)  If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars.  Each has a magnitude and a direction.  This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction:  the end of civilization as we know it.

 

Hypocrisy? Double-Standardization?

Accusing a leftist of being a hypocrite is like accusing a meat-eating Texas cattle rancher of being a carnivore.

The concerns of bourgeois morality find as little purchase with leftists as the concerns of vegetarians with meat-eaters. 

A curious 'disconnect' is therefore displayed by earnest Fox commentators who upbraid leftists for their hypocrisy and double standards when, preaching the need for draconian measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, they support Joe Biden's opening up the Southern border to a flood of unvetted and untested illegal aliens among whom are human traffickers, drug smugglers, gun runners, and carriers of a variety of diseases including COVID-19.  

The naïve Tucker Carlson, for example, appears shocked and surprised at leftist hypocrisy and double-standardization. He hasn't yet fully grasped, although he is learning, that for leftists, the (apparent) issue is not the (real) issue.  In this case the apparent issue is public health while the real issues is the expansion of power for leftists who, in U. S. politics, are Democrats. Not the expansion of power for its own sake, mind you, but for the sake of the fundamental transformation of America that Barack Obama announced. (Tucker seems to think that the Dems just want power for the sake of power. Not so.)

Objectively, it is absurdly counterproductive to open the borders during a public health crisis, especially when the invaders are from a country like Mexico, as opposed to, say, Canada.  But that is so only if the paramount concern is public health.  When the paramount concern is to gain permanent power for leftist ends, then it all makes sense.  Lives are worth sacrificing for the glorious end, which justifies the disreputable means.

Repeat this a few times until it sinks in: Leftists are not constrained by our values and norms. They use our values and norms  against us. You can read all about it in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.  Truth, for example, is normative for us, but not for them. That is not to say that they won't tell the truth; they will when it serves their purposes. Otherwise they lie, repeatedly and brazenly.  Their purpose trumps the norm, which is to say: they are not bound by the norm. It has no deontic hold on them, they being of the tribe of Lucifer. Alinsky dedicated his Rules to the fallen light-bearer.

We are bound by the norm of truth. This is why, when we violate it, the charge of hypocrisy reaches us and is a concern for us and an occasion for us to examine our consciences. 

What Tucker and Co. need to come to understand is that our political opponents are political enemies: They cannot be reached by appeals to reason or to conscience, by admonitions or accusations of hypocrisy and double-standardization.  We and they do not live in the same moral universe. To invoke a rather more terrestrial metaphor: we and they do not stand on common ground. Ours is the terra firma of reality. Theirs is a swamp of illusion abutting a gulag overlain by a utopian fog, mephitic and Mephistophelean.

I appear to be warming to my rhetoric. Time to pack it in. But one more thing, a bit of self-criticism.

I once said that if you removed from leftists all of their double standards, they would have no standards at all.  Not quite right! For there would be one standard left standing:

Win at all costs and by any means!

For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue

'Never' is too strong, but close enough:

Let me explain. As per the graphic, for the Left, the real issues are not protection of children and anti-terrorism. They are but distractions from the real issues. The real issues are suppression of dissent, erosion and ultimate elimination of constitutionally-protected  civil liberties such as those guaranteed by the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution, expansion of centralized (federal) government control with concomitant violation of states' rights as guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment, not to mention institution of an omni-invasive Sino-styled surveillance apparatus and 'social credit' register to further limit dissent, stifle liberties, and 'cancel' livelihoods.

But why do the leftists who now dominate and control the Democrat Party want these things? To insure their gaining and maintaining of power in perpetuity, to be sure. But that is only half the answer.  Why do they want power? They want it not just because they exult in its exercise and increase, but because they want it to forward their agenda, which is the destruction of the American republic as she was founded to be. Obama announced the goal brazenly: to fundamentally transform America, not to make needed reforms and improvements, but to transform her fundamentally.  But conservatives, who in the end conserve nothing, and are content to talk and write and conduct seminars on cruise ships, are slow on the uptake, and, hobbled by their civility and other virtues,  cannot bring themselves to believe that their political opponents are political enemies who mean what they say and out for their political liquidation.

So when Tucker Carlson, et al., say that the leftists are out for power, that is not a good answer. After all, we of the Coalition of the Reasonable want power too. Bear in mind that power is good.  (If it weren't, omnipotence would not be counted among the divine omni-attributes.)  Without power one cannot implement the good. The difference is that we want power to implement constructive ends whereas the Coalition of the Treasonable who bow and scrape before the heads of evil regimes, who open the border during a pandemic, who empower criminals, who undermine the rule of law, want power so as to achieve destructive ends. 

Am I alleging that everyone on the Left knowingly promotes evil? No. Some leftists are fools, others are ignorant, still others are useful idiots, others still are suborned by their greed and power-hunger. TDS continues to drive many insane . It's a mixed bag.  But there is no moral equivalence here between Left and Right any more than there was between the S.U. and the U.S.

There is no Wisdom on the Left

The Left is at war with wisdom, as Dennis Prager here argues. 

And so one can only laugh at Hillary's latest money-grubbing venture in assuagement of her bottomless avarice, a book in which she casts  pearls of her 'essential' wisdom before the deplorable swine. 

Here is one of her immortal pearls. Now hear Mr. Prager:

 

For the Left, the Subject is not the Subject: Why Math is 'Racist'

It has often been noted that for the Left, the issue is not the issue.  David Horowitz:

As President Obama’s political mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it in Rules for Radicals: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all of the angels are on one side and the devils are on the other.” Here is another statement from Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party. (emphasis added)

"The issue is never the issue." The issue is the gaining and maintaining of power so as to "fundamentally transform America."  For example, if leftists (Democrats in U. S. politics) were really concerned about the spread of COVID-19, they would not open the borders to illegal aliens as the Biden administration has now done. Whatever concern they have about the spread of disease is trumped by considerations of how the problem can be exploited to enhance their power.  Power first, public health second, if that. Never let a crisis go to waste; that is, never let it go unexploited for ideological leverage.  And now a further step left: never let a crisis end.  

It occurred to me the other day that something structurally similar explains the absurd claim that mathematics is racist.  No one believes this, not even the most febrile of leftists, just as no one believes that a serious health crisis will be unaffected by allowing disease-carrying illegal aliens to flow into the country in great numbers unchecked and unvetted. 

So why do so many on the Left  say that math is racist? Because the subject is not the subject. The subject is not mathematics, a discipline about as far removed from ideological taint as can be imagined, but the supposed 'systemic racism' of American society.  There is no such thing, of course, but no matter: invocation of this nonexistent state of affairs is useful for the promotion of the leftist agenda just as he inefficacy of masks and the uselessness and outright deleteriousness of lock-downs is no reason not to make use of masks and lock-downs and draconian rules to further the destruction of the American republic as she was founded to be.

Merit and 'Equity'

Those who lack merit too often seek to achieve by political means what they cannot achieve by accomplishing something. Leftists aid and abet them. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are not enough for leftists: they demand equality of outcome.  But this cannot arise naturally due to differences in interests, attitudes, abilities, and work habits among individuals and groups. So equality must be imposed by force by government. Thus arises what leftists now call 'equity.'  The word is an obfuscatory coinage of the sort one can expect from Orwellian language-abusers. The typical leftist is a stealth ideologue. His mendacity disallows an outright call for  equality of outcome or result, and merit be damned; he smuggles his thought into sleepy heads with 'equity' in violation of one of the traditional meanings of the word, namely, "justice according to natural law or right." (Merriam-Webster) "Equity' as used by a leftist language-hijacker has a meaning opposite to the traditional one. Hence my accusation of Orwellianism. 

(As you know, Orwell himself was not Orwellian, but the opposite. Interestingly, to call him Orwellian would itself be Orwellian.)

Among the things 'equity' obfuscates is the contradiction in enforced equality of result: the governmental agencies of enforcement are vastly unequal in power to those upon whom they seek to impose 'equity.'

Of late, Big Tech and 'Woke' Capital have proven to be exceptions  to the old rule: their Croesian* economic clout  allows them to buy off the governmental enforcers.  More on this, anon.

________________

*An adjectival form of 'Croesus.' You know who he was.  After coining the (non-obfuscatory) adjective, a little Internet pokey-wokey searching assures me that the adjective is in use in such publications as WSJ and Forbes.  

"One Man's Datum is Another Man's Theory"

Why do I use 'man'? To exclude women? No, to exclude leftists, both men and women. I believe in equality when it comes to the exclusion of the destructive.

In the '70s, when it first really got going, gender-inclusive language seemed to many a very good thing indeed. It showed a welcoming attitude to the distaff contingent, a salutary openness, a gracious concession to those females who felt excluded by (what in fact are) gender-neutral uses of 'man' and 'he,' not to mention a praiseworthy recognition of the excellence of many women in many hitherto male-dominated fields.  Gentlemen are considerate of the feelings of others even when said feelings are unsupported by reason.   And surely it is true that some women are superior to some men in almost every field.  And surely people should be evaluated as individuals on their merits. 

It all started out with good intentions, and many conservatives went along with it, oblivious to the unforeseen consequences. But now, a half-century later,  we see where it has led. 

And so if I use the sex-neutral 'man' and 'he' and cognates, it is not because I am a knuckle-dragger, one who hails from the valley of Neander, but because I am a man of intelligence, discernment, and high culture, a member of the Coalition of the Reasonable, who is doing his tiny bit to resist and if possible reverse the subversion of our glorious alma mater, our fostering mother, the English language.   I am resisting politicization, tribalism, and the weaponization of language.   Can I ramp up my charge to the allegation that the Left is committing matricide against our dear mother?  I'll essay this later.

For I say unto you my brothers and sisters, the subversion of language is propadeutic to the subversion of thought.  The latter, I fear, is what our enemies intend, the thoughtless being the easier to rule and control.

Denial of the Lapsus is the Left's Main Lapse

My title above. A long-time reader sends us his thoughts. Here are some of them, with my  edits and a bit of commentary.

Every so often I reflect on causes of the Leftist mentality, and all the madness it leads to. If we scan across favourite activities of the current woke age, such as racialism and its attendant theories on the left (the evil of colonialism, white privilege, white fragility etc), the socialist project, trans-activism and biological denialism and so on, there lurks a common deep assumption which is that the (authentic) left does not accept the inherent and unavoidably fallen state of man.

Exactly right. As a result, leftists embrace such illusions as man's indefinite malleability and perfectibility.

This is equivalent to denying the human condition as a protracted battle to overcome our own worst instincts and live good lives. According to this assumption, it is possible to be individually sinless, one just has to find the correct Utopian ideology and practice it, and to evangelise it to others. If one thinks one can be personally morally irreproachable, one can be self-righteous, and one may sit on a higher moral plane.

And in judgment of others.  This goes together with a failure to recognize the depth of evil in the human heart, in every human heart, evil whose ultimate source is man's free will, the existence of which leftists also deny.

 

Now of course, only some individuals can attain moral perfection. Leftism is fundamentally  about a two level society: those who know and control the doctrine of the one true way, and those who need to be controlled. If certain chosen individuals can be perfect, there's no need for God, indeed they can create their own church. In Leftist thinking, this is usually something called 'the Party'. Those not in the Party or completely deferential to it are against it and to be castigated, publicly flogged or imprisoned.

 

From the rejection of inherent human baseness and the delusion of perfectibility spring a torrent of other terrible ideas, starting with the idea that everyone can, if correctly enabled, be equal. The idea of innate difference - of intelligence, ambition, diligence, or any other capability - is simply unacceptable. But if a person can be perfect, given the right help, all persons can be equally perfect, and thus perfectly equal. Anyone rejecting difference and thus equality is against the church, and must be punished.

This is crucially important for understanding the mentality of the Left, and in the USA, the mentality of the Democrat Party which is now an openly hard-Left party.  (Its crypto-leftism under the Clintons and Obama is now manifest and brazen.) My type of conservatism accepts the equality of persons as rights-possessors on the normative plane, but insists on the obvious fact of empirical inequality, both of individuals and of groups, on the factual plane.  While we are equal in respect of such rights as the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to acquire (not be given) property, and others, we are manifestly not equal in respect of abilities and virtues and their implementation. We are not all equally intelligent, ambitious, diligent, conscientious, self-controlled, high-minded, sensitive to art and music, respectful, temperate, prudent, courageous, just . . . . It is therefore a fallacy to infer racism from inequality of outcome.

 

Leftists, denying these obvious differences, show no respect for reality. They want to re-make reality in their own image. They confuse the world as it is with the world as they would like it to be.  Hence their vacuous talk of imagining and re-imagining, re-imagining policing, for example, which starts, absurdly, with defunding the police.  Their inability to understand the need for the necessary evil of policing shows  a lack of understanding of human nature, which is not surprising given their denial of human nature  by their acceptance of the notion of indefinite malleability.

Roots of Antifa

Almost all of my political commentary and linkage these days is at my Facebook page, but some of you so despise that platform that you will not join me there. I fully understand. But this article is important enough to be worth citing here.

A 'Woke' Paradox

Is it objectively true that objectivity is a white-supremacist value?

Assert that it is, and you presuppose it.

But if you say that it isn't, then why should we listen to you?

Sebastian Haffner: Totalitarians Intolerant of Private Life

Among the dozen or so books I am currently reading is Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (Picador, 2003).  Written in 1939, it was first published in German in 2000. The Third Reich is no more, but the following passage remains  highly relevant at a time when the main forms of totalitarianism are Chinese Communism, the hybrid political-religious ideology Islam, and the hard-Leftism of the Democrat Party in the USA:

No, retiring into private life was not an option. However far one retreated, everywhere one was confronted with the very thing one had been fleeing from. I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old distinction between politics and private life, and that it was quite impossible to treat it  merely as a "political event." It took place not only in the sphere of politics but also in each individual private life; it seeped through the walls like a poison gas. If you wanted to evade the gas there was only one option: to remove yourself physically -- emigration, Emigration:  that meant saying goodbye to the country of one's birth, language, and education and severing all patriotic ties.

In that summer of 1933 [the year Hitler seized power] I was prepared to take even this final step.  (219)

Haffner did emigrate, to England, then a free country. But where will we go when the whole world is under the yoke of the 'woke'?

A review of Haffner's book.

Addendum. The totalitarianism of the 20th century was hard: enforced by the threat of the gulag, etc.  That of the 21st century, soft. See Rod Dreher, The Coming Social Credit System. Excerpt:

You think it can’t happen here? As I show in the book, Google, Facebook, and other major corporations already collect tons of data from every one of us, based on how we use the Internet and our smartphones. If you have an Alexa, or any other “smart” device in your home, then whether you realize it or not, you have consented to allow all kinds of personal data to be hoovered up by the device and shared with a corporation. The technological capacity already exists in this country. The data are already being collected. 

And Covid has pushed the United States much farther down the road to becoming a cashless society.  There is an obvious safety-related reason for this. But banks have a vested financial interest in weaning Americans off of cash:

“Big Finance is the key driver moving us to a cashless society,” he said. “You’ll notice banks have been slowly closing branches and ATMs and they’re doing so in an effort to nudge us more toward their digital platforms. This saves them labor, it saves them a lot of real estate costs, and it improves their bottom line.”

What happens when you can’t buy things at stores with cash? It’s already happening now. I’ve been to stores here in Baton Rouge that will only transact business with credit or debit cards, citing Covid, or the inability to make change because of a coin shortage. It’s understandable, but you should be well aware that the move to a cashless society makes each of us completely vulnerable to being shut out of the economy by fiat.

The Main Threat of the Left to the Right

The following quotation from Rod Dreher receives the plenary MavPhil endorsement:

. . . the “major threat of the far left” to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in power, they will go pedal to the medal [metal] on a soft totalitarian “social justice” regime that would punish dissenters by costing them their livelihoods, and ruining their churches and other institutions. The major threat is the empowerment of ideologues who believe that all white people are racist, by virtue of their being white, and that the state should intervene to arrange society to suppress those disfavored by the left (whites, non-feminists, religious traditionalists, social conservatives, etc). The major threat is that they wish to erase American history and foundational principles of our constitutional order. The major threat is that the state will use its power to force parents to allow their minor children to take cross-sex hormones, and will seize those children if they don’t. The major threat is that the left in power through professional associations (law, medical, and so forth) will make it impossible for dissenters from the social justice credo to earn a living. The major threat is that violent social justice mobs will overrun cities and even suburbs, demanding that everyone assent to their ideology, or be looted or burned out. The major threat is that the left is propagandizing the young to despise their religion, their family, their country, their history, and themselves.

In sum: The major threat is that the state, aligned with powerful US-based global corporations, an ideologized mass media, and universities — basically, all the elites in the ruling class, distributed throughout institutions — will accelerate its current evolutionary path towards a coordinated totalizing system that will seek to crush any dissent or opposition to it.

This is why sane and decent Americans absolutely must vote for Donald J. Trump.  Dreher doesn't draw this conclusion due to his irrational Trump hatred, but indications are that he too will vote for Trump come November.

Addendum (9/7). Dr. Vito Caiati comments:

Thank you for posting that long quotation from Rod Dreher, which well sums up the principal threat of the social, cultural, and intellectual threat of the Left.

Today, Malcolm Pollack calls attention to the coming post-election mayhem that the Left will unleash given a Trump victory in November  He links to Michael Anton's "alarming" essay on the form this "coup" will take (https://americanmind.org/essays/the-coming-coup/).  Anton may well be right, and if so, the threat that we are facing goes far beyond that of the "soft-totalitarianism" so often discussed by Dreher. Very dark times have arrived if even a fraction of Anton's prognostication occurs.

I am increasingly convinced that this federal republic of ours, the product of early capitalist and pre-capitalist social forces, that is, of a particular historical conjuncture in the history of early modern Europe and its colonial offshoots, is at odds with the underlying interests of contemporary corporate capital,whose ruling class and the myriad of minions who either serve it directly or are sustained and tolerated by it--all anti-national, globalist, technocratic, anti-democratic,  and anti-(classical) liberal to one degree of another--and that they are determined to sweep it away.  The Left today is bizarrely made up of the most disparate and far-flung social elements, from the anarchist or pseudo-Marxist Antifa shock troops in the streets; the apparatchiks of the federal, state, and local governments; the swarms of  ill-educated "intellectuals" in and out of the universities; the leftist heretical or  cowed"Christian" leaders of the Catholic and other churches; and of course the hacks  of the media and the culture industries.  Whether this coalition, wielded together only partially by ideology, can withstand the inevitable leftward track that would come with full power is unlikely, but in the meantime it will have reduced what remains of the Old Republic and its traditions to ruins.

PS. In my quick list of the Left's "disparate" elements, I forgot to include the significant portion of very rich corporate elite, the core of the ruling class, which have become the key funders and advocates of its ideology and policies, whether through conviction or convenience. Here, one can speak of a strange compromesso storico, one based on continued corporate dominance (for example, silence on real economic and social problems), and hence the interests of the ruling class, in return for the advancement of the tribalist, racist, anti-American, anti-Western ideology and policies of the Left. This is not the first time that capitalists and corporate elites have coalesced with anti-democratic and anti-liberal political formations; one only has to consider the accommodations of German big capital with the Nazi regime or that of Japanese zaibatu with Japanese militarism. This time, however, the dance is with the Left.

Trotsky's Faith in Man

On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

Read the rest.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.  His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a title of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium. 

Is the Left Out for Power Alone?

The following is a sample of (some of) what I post at my Facebook page.  I swore off Facebook for July, but I have been back in the groove since 1 August doing my humble bit to beat back the forces of darkness.  They have sicced their censor bots on me, so I have to be careful how I say things lest I get de-platformed.  My obscurity affords me some cover.  Obscurity has its uses and compensations.  The value of fame, on the other hand, may be gauged by the quality of those who confer it.

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

Tucker Carlson and many other conservatives say that leftists are out for power alone, but it is not true. I grant, of course, that leftists love power and will do anything to gain it and maintain it. But why do they want it? They want it in order to implement their agenda which they believe will be good for them and their clients. It is for the sake of the agenda -- the things to be done -- that leftists want power.

With their hands on the levers of power, the Democrats can keep the borders open, empty the prisons, defund the police, confiscate firearms, do away with the filibuster, give felons the right to vote while in prison, outlaw home schooling, alter curricula to promote the 'progressive' worldview (by among other things injecting 1619 project fabrications into said curricula), infiltrate and ultimately destroy the institutions of civil society, erase history by the destruction of monuments, remove every vestige of Christinaity from the public square, pass 'hate speech' laws to squelch dissent, and so on into the abyss.

Old Left and New Left

A succinct differentiation:

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

BLM is Playing by the Book. Alinsky's Book

Michael Brown:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it all, comrades.

Grammar is Propadeutic to Logic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

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

In Faust, Goethe gives Mephistopheles the following lines:

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

I cannot improve upon Walter Kaufmann's translation:

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

Vito Caiati (7/24) responds:

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

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

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

Is Grammar Racist?

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

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

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

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

The Priorities of Comrade Bozo de Blasio

Defunding: The Most Effective Weapon in Our Arsenal?

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

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

Do You Value Your Health?

Then you must be a white supremacist.

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

Christianity and Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We are Up Against

It helps to know the enemy and not be as naive as a Mona Charen. Despite her manifold lovelinesses and virtues, Charen is a useful idiot for the Left and a useless idiot for us. (She is what I call a 'topical idiot'; she is obviously not a total idiot. And while I am abusing her to some extent, my abuse is for her own good, grounded as it is in fact and in a concern for her mental clarity.)

Never-Trumpers, who are mostly journalists and lawyers, and have never built anything, allow themselves to become unhinged and distracted by Trump the inarticulate builder and political interloper, by his foibles and fatuities, his ungrammatical tweets, his exaggerations, sexual peccadillos, and what all else. And so they cannot see who the real enemy is.  They cannot see the threat to their own way of life and to the set of values which they espouse but are impotent to conserve.

At the same time, these yap-and-scribble quislings and quibblers, these cruise-ship 'conservatives' who succeed in conserving nothing except their status and salaries, propose no candidate who could do better than Trump.  They are impotent nay-sayers and obstructionists. A pox be upon them, and their dwellings and cruise ships and seminar rooms and all their works and days, and their progeny, intellectual and loin-driven, unto the seventh generation.

Please study the following from Powerline.

 

Memo to Leftists

Erase history and you won't be able to learn from it, including the dire consequences of erasing it.

The Childish Mentality of the Social Justice Warrior

The Cancel Culture's Icons are Subject to Cancellation

Arnold Ahlert:

“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” —Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

The American Left has embraced a cancel culture whereby those who evince even the slightest deviation from moral perfection, no matter how long ago it occurred, is grounds for turning ordinary Americans into pariahs — and obliterating the historical contributions of prominent ones. That this moral perfection is defined by a generation of progressives with contempt for American history and culture, with no remorse for 60 million abortions, and with anarchy, looting, arson, and murder framed as “peaceful protests,” is beyond arrogant — even more so when it’s applied to historical figures who lived in wholly different times. What about progressive icons? Shouldn’t the same deficiencies precipitate the same cancellations?

You've been Cancelled and Sacked; Why Grovel?

Here:

Even liking the wrong tweets can cost you your career. Mike McCulloch, a math lecturer at Plymouth University, was recently investigated by his employer for liking a tweet that read “All lives matter.” Here in Canada, Michael Korenberg, chair of the board of governors for the University of British Columbia, was forced to step down because he liked some tweets praising Donald Trump. Nobody is safe—not even the phenomenally popular author J.K. Rowling, who has been hounded and harassed for saying that, when it comes to trans women, biology is still a thing.

My own field, journalism, has become notoriously full of little inquisitors. In the most disturbing example, James Bennet, opinion editor of the most important paper in the world, the New York Times, lost his job in June for publishing an opinion piece that many of the younger staffers didn’t like. It was written by a Republican senator, Tom Cotton, who argued that Donald Trump would be justified in deploying military troops to cities if local police could not maintain order in the streets. Staffers claimed the piece was so toxic that it put some of their colleagues’ lives in danger. Like many others, Mr. Bennet departed with a grovelling apology.

If you think the radical mob is now editing your daily paper, you might well be right. Last month, Stan Wischnowski, top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was forced to resign over a headline that read, “Buildings Matter, Too.” All of this is dolefully reminiscent of China’s Cultural Revolution, during which students denounced their elders and made them parade through the streets in dunce hats before they were packed off to the pig farms for re-education.

And there is no statute of limitations. Last week, Boeing. Co.’s communications chief, Niel Golightly, abruptly resigned after an anonymous employee filed an ethics complaint over an article he wrote in 1987, 33 years ago. In it, the former military pilot had expressed the opinion that women shouldn’t serve in combat (a mainstream position at the time). “My argument was embarrassingly wrong and offensive,” he said in another cringeworthy mea culpa. “The article is not reflective of who I am.”

If you have lost your good, well-paying job, and are now persona non grata among the bien-pensant, why grovel? The worst has already happened. The Left has yet to build its re-education camps; so at the moment you needn't fear incarceration and 're-education.'  

So why  the grovelling apologies as in the fourth  and sixth examples?

Why did Golightly go so lightly?

Leftism is not a Religion

Leftism is not a religion, but it is importantly like a religion.*

How so? Religions make a total claim on the lives of their adherents, and the committed latter live accordingly. The serious Buddhist, for example, does not merely meditate for an hour in the morning; he tries to bring the mindfulness of the meditation chamber into his whole day. He essays to live the Dharma. It is the same with serious Jews, Christians and Muslims despite their different beliefs and practices.  The serious religionist sees everything from the point of view of his religion. It is not just a Friday, or a Saturday, or a Sunday thing.

It is the same with the serious leftist: his commitment is total to his totalitarian scheme. He politicizes everything -- even the native flora of California -- because, in his preternatural wrongheadedness, he thinks everything is political. Everything must be held hostage to the glorious Revolution at the secular, or immanent, eschaton to be brought about by the 'woke' who know and hate the true Devil whose name is 'Racism.'

But of course the political is but a part of reality and not the whole of it. The leftist is an idolater of a piece of finitude, the political sphere within the realm of Finite Being. But if God exists, then the Absolute exists and to live with total devotion to the Absolute cannot be idolatry. Matthew 22:36-40 New International Version (NIV):

36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

It should be easily understood, therefore, why the Left is violently and viciously opposed to religion, even to the point of working in cahoots with Islam to destroy Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity. The Left will brook no competition in the totalitarian sweepstakes.

_________________

*It is a logical error to suppose that if X is like Y, then X is a species of Y.  Dennis Prager makes this mistake. But then he is merely a talk jock, even if one of the very best. 

Chess is Racist!

Not only is chess racist, it is also sexist and patriarchal. The fact that the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board proves nothing to the contrary. The powers allowed to the Queen are in truth nothing more than so many sops thrown to the feminists to keep them quiet.

The sexism and patriarchalism of chess is proven by the dignity afforded to the King. 

Wherein resides the dignity of the King?  At every time in every possible game, the King is on the board. He cannot be captured: he never leaves the board while the game is on.  He may be checked and checkmated; he is never captured. His royal consort, however, must submit to sacrifice, and is sacrificed gladly in the most beautiful of games. She has no dignity unto herself; she is but a means, nothing more than an overgrown pawn, and in some cases an ambitious upstart who has clawed her way to the eighth rank with the determination of a Hillary. She must die, when called upon, for the glory of His Majesty.

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.

It is therefore most heartening to read that chess has been banned in some places in America. May this trend continue as we march forward, ever stronger, together to the land of social justice where there are no winners and no losers. 

RELATED: 'Cancel culture' out to cancel chess!

Yet another proof that there is nothing so stupid and destructive that a 'liberal' won't support it.

Academentia

The Mandatory Banality of University Presidents. Excerpt:

Outrage has been stirred. An “incomprehensible loss” (Bacow) has befallen us. “Anger, pain, and fear” (Casey) have been unleashed. Something must be done to bring about communities that are “truly safe, supportive, and inclusive for all” (Price). Worse, this killing comes on top of the epidemic that “has profoundly disrupted the lives of people worldwide” (Bacow) and we “know it is even more challenging to support and lift each other up during this global pandemic, with the added difficulty of social distancing” (Barron).

Add This to the Fallacy File

Beware of Kafkatrapping!

A Comment Thread on Tribalism and Identity Politics from December, 2015

Part of an uncommonly good thread. Here is the entry to which the thread attaches.

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

Anon,

My point was that many short comments are better than one long one.

One problem here is that I tossed out a word, 'tribalism,' but did not define it. What's worse is that I used it very loosely. Mea culpa. It is a stretch to think of women as a 'tribe.'

Perhaps we have a 'family' of tribalisms: racial, sexual, etc.

Now I'll take a stab at a definition:

A person P is a racial tribalist =df P defines himself and values himself first and foremost in terms of his being a member of the race of which he happens to be a member.

I'm Caucasian as you may have guessed. But when I get up in the morning I don't look into the mirror and affirm: I am a white man! This is who I am most fundamentally. This is what makes me be ME. This fact is what constitutes my innermost identity and is that attribute upon which my value as a person primarily supervenes.

I am therefore not a racial tribalist by my definition. This is not to say that I am not white or that being white is not a part of WHAT I am, namely an animal, a bit of the world's fauna. Indeed, insofar as I am an animal, it is arguable that I am essentially (as opposed to accidentally) white if we grant Kripke's point about the essentiality of origin: if I could not have had parents other than the parents I in fact have, then, given that both are white, I could not have failed to be white. So I am essentially white.

But is it essential to WHO I am that I be white? (Related question: Are persons reducible to objects in the natural world?)

Now in my definition above there is the phrase "member of the race of which he happens to be a member" which suggests that it is a contingent fact about me that I am white. There is the animal that bears my name, an animal that is essentially white. But there is a sense, brought out by Thomas  Nagel in various writings, in which I am contingently the animal I am. I am contingently an animal that is essentially white.

But now we are drifting towards some very deep waters.

Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 11:12 AM

I’m not sure we need to even address the question of whether our race is essential to our personal identity or not. Isn’t it enough that it is a feature of us that is deeply important to our functioning in the world and part of the natural categories into which we separate ourselves?

As you define it, I doubt anyone here is a racial tribalist, because saying that you are “first and foremost” part of a race makes it sound as though the interests of that group or yourself as a member of that group trump everything else. I take it that the position that Jacques and I are defending is just that racial groups are morally legitimate and one’s racial affiliation provides genuine moral grounds for certain prioritizations of members of that race.

Posted by: Anonymous | Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 11:43 AM

Anon. writes,

>>it is obvious that it is morally permissible to prioritize one’s family, one’s country, one’s species, etc. in various ways. So, it’s already obvious that “tribalism” is morally permissible. Why arbitrarily think that racial tribalism is illegitimate given that tribalism in generally is clearly morally permissible?<<

I take it that what you mean by tribalism in general is favoring or "prioritizing" one's X over another person's X, if they are different. So racial tribalism is favoring or "prioritizing" one's race over another's assuming they are different.

Whether or not this is morally permissible in a given case will depend on the nature of the favoring. In the O. J. Simpson case, the black jurors voted to acquit despite a mountain of evidence showing that he had murdered two white people. They favored Simpson over his victims because he is black.  I would say that their favoring was morally impermissible.

We have to agree upon a definition of 'tribalism,' however, if we are to move forward.

Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 12:08 PM

When Quotation Suffices for Refutation

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies, Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons. 

Welcome to the delusional world of Ta-Nehisi Coates, that darling of 'liberal' elitists and the winner of numerous awards and accolades. I read his Between the World and Me a while back. The above is from that book.

Who is sicker, Coates, or the 'liberals' who fete him?

Grievance is a Growth Industry

Leftists cling to their grievances despite progress made and remedies applied. And then they invent new ones. For they must remain permanently aggrieved. That is who they are: permanently adolescent in a state of permanent rebellion.  That they have less and less to be angry about means nothing. The merest microaggression suffices to 'trigger' them. 'Racism,' for example,  is everywhere. 

Did you know that hiking and running are racist?

There is nothing so mind-numbingly knuckleheaded that some 'liberal' won't maintain it.

Political Correctness in the Philosophy Journals

I found the following in a technical article on the philosophy of time by a male author:

The defender of the spotlight theory also embraces past and future objects, but she accepts a "fuller" conception of these objects than the Williamsonian.  According to her . . . .

Suddenly I am distracted from the abstruse content by the injection of politics where it does not belong. "Another lefty," I think to myself, "signalling his virtue and flaunting his political correctness." The use of 'she' and 'her' is not only jarring but also slightly comical. Women are famously 'under-represented' in philosophy, to use a lefty expression that conflates the factual and the normative, but few who work in the philosophy of time are women. This is not to deny that there are women who have made outstanding contributions to this, the most difficult branch of philosophy.

My complaint will of course leave the lefty cold. 'She' feels that standard English with its gender-neutral uses of 'he' and 'him' is sexist, presumably because it excludes women. It does no such thing, of course, but the lefty will remain unfazed. But I know how they feel, so I have an irenic suggestion.

Let's honor the classically liberal principle of free speech. You write your way and we'll write our way.  We will tolerate you, your beliefs, and your modes of expression, but we expect the same in return.  Will it work?

I doubt it. There is nothing classically liberal about the contemporary Left. In fact, we conservatives are the new (classical) liberals, and leftists are the new authoritarians.  Peace with such dogmatists seems not to be in the cards.  Free speech and open inquiry are not among their values. So unless we can achieve the political equivalent of divorce, we should expect tensions to run high.

Why Do Leftists Call Good People Racists?

Dennis Prager:

First, truth is not a left-wing value. As I have said and written ever since studying communism and the left in graduate school at the Columbia University Russian Institute, truth is a [classically] liberal value and a conservative value, but it is not a left-wing value. However, destroying opponents by destroying their reputations is a left-wing value -- whether it's charging Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with multiple rapes, preoccupying the country with the fake charge that Donald Trump's presidential campaign colluded with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election, or the charges such as those made against me.

Second, smearing opponents is not only a left-wing value; it is the left's modus operandi. And the reason for that is: The left does not win through argument. It wins through smear. If you differ with the left, you are, by definition, sexist, racist, bigoted, intolerant, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, fascist and/or a hater. The proof? You cannot name a single opponent of the left who has not been so labeled.

True, but we need to go deeper. Why don't leftists value truth, and why do they smear their opponents? The most obvious answer is that leftists are just not good people. Prager has said in the past that leftism turns good people bad. I see it the other way around: some if not most of the people who embrace leftism in the first place do so because they are morally defective specimens of humanity blind to their defects because of their absurd conceit that people are basically good.  It's paradoxical: believing humanity to be good at bottom and held back  by contingent socio-economic arrangements, leftists see their way clear to the commission of the most horrendous crimes. Communists, using the power of the state, murdered some 100 million in the 20th century alone.

They broke a lot of eggs, but where's the omelet?

The Left's Attack on Charities

The Left's assault on individual liberty, private property, and free markets extends to an insane attack on charitable giving.  Part of the explanation is that leftists are totalitarians who cannot tolerate the institutions of civil society that stand between the individual and Leviathan. Here is a fine statement:

Americans are historically averse to socialism, and this helps explain their historical culture of giving generously to charity. The U.S. leads the world in private giving, donating twice as much as the runner-up (New Zealand) as a percentage of GDP.

Socialism is the enemy of charity because it outsources all compassion and altruism to the state. In an age when most Americans worry about and mourn the erosion of civil society institutions, socialism wants to supplant them all — to leave people atomized, dependent upon government from cradle to grave for material, intellectual, social, and (although it does not recognize them) spiritual needs.

But government does not and cannot truly love anyone. It is especially bad at lifting the poor out of their poverty. It has such a poor track record in dealing with true hard cases — the homeless, for example — that in the U.S. today, local governments almost universally outsource the job of caring to private charities.

Socialists believe that all meaningful human interactions are political. Theirs is a dehumanizing ideology that separates people from their neighbors. It strips human beings of moral agency. As the experience in Venezuela and in post-communist countries has demonstrated, a successful socialist system ultimately creates a contest of “every man for himself” that makes the most ruthless capitalist blush.

Excellent, except for the knee-jerk use of 'track record.' Call me a pedant! We need more pedantry, precision, and punctiliousness.

Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America

Excerpts:

Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary career.

In Dark Agenda’s last chapter, Horowitz puts forward the metaphor of civil war to define what might be in front of us. It’s a possible outcome of the divisions that beset us and which we’re all supposed to want to “heal.” One prosecutes a war, however, not to heal one’s enemies, but rather to incapacitate them.

For Americans only the Age of Lincoln offers the closest comparison to our parlous state. But shall Christians and their Jewish allies (agnostic and observant alike) prepare for military conflict and await—or initiate—our Fort Sumter? Is it not quixotic to put all our eggs in the electoral consensus-building basket? Are we restricted to chronicling our enemies’ crimes, as Horowitz has masterfully done in dozens of popular and scholarly tomes? Urgency calls forth a response, but if Horowitz has an idea of how Americans might defeat the Left’s dark agenda, he doesn’t share it here. No suggested plan of action follows the note of urgency he sounds.

In the third paragraph, Flood touches upon a point that troubles me as well. We have reams of incisive conservative commentary on what the Left has wrought but precious little by way of concrete proposals for ameliorative action by individuals. In  fairness to Horowitz, however, it needs noting that in the concluding chapters of Big Agenda (Humanix 2017), he lists various things the Republican party and President Trump can do. So he does outline a plan of action, and he is appropriately combative:

The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)

Still and all, I would like to see a list of what individuals can do beyond voting and writing letters and blog posts.  Does Tony Flood have any suggestions?  I suppose I myself should put up or shut up while well aware of the dangers of saying anything that might incite violence among the unhinged. (But violence is being done every day by leftists to the unborn and to our Constitutional rights and sacred American values). So here are three suggestions, just to keep this post short. I invite Tony to e-mail me with any thoughts he may have.

• Buy guns and learn how to use them. The idea here is deterrence and not aggression. A well-armed populace is a mighty check against both the criminal element that leftists work to empower, and against leftists themselves and their agents. We can demoralize them without firing a shot. Call it winning through intimidation. They will never respect us, but they can be brought to fear us. (An analysis of respect might show that fear is is a large part of it.) Grandmaster Nimzowitsch's remark is apropos: "The threat is stronger than the execution."  2A is concrete back-up for 1A and all the rest of our rights. Leftists know this. This explains the mindlessness and mendacity of their confiscatory assault on our Second Amendment rights.  
• Vote with your feet and your wallet.  Leave blue localities and let them languish in the feculence their policies have birthed, and bring your money and tax dollars to healthy places. 
• Defund the Left. For example, refuse to support your leftist alma mater, to use a border-line pleonastic expression.      

Flood's review concludes:

Of course, Dark Agenda is no more an essay on spirituality than on political philosophy. The case it makes, however, cries out for at least a hint of the response that its author believes will meet this greatest of all challenges. If there’s no political way to overcome the darkness, only the spiritual route is left.

Yet David Horowitz leaves this tension unresolved. For him, the Christian Scriptures are not (as far as I know) a source of divinely revealed truth; Christianity is but the historically contingent arrangement that works for people who happen to love instead of hate Western civilization; things don’t go any deeper than that. Am I wrong about him?

Like all human arrangements, however, Western Civ will eventually pass away into the void out of which all things, including humans, allegedly emerged . . . unless the Christian worldview is overarchingly true. Maybe Horowitz has one more book in him in which he can address this question. But I’d prefer to be shown that something in his vast literary oeuvre already has.

Having read more Horowitz than Tony has, I believe he is right in the second paragraph lately quoted.

And I am sympathetic with the third paragraph, though not with Flood's enthusiasm for Van Til. See the entries in my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category. 

Finally, I have a deep-going analytic post on Horowitz' agnosticism as he presents it in Dark Agenda. See Five Grades of Agnosticism.  

Was Jesus a Socialist?

No way! He actually fed people.

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I came to this witticism via Karl White who got it from someone unnamed.  It is too good not to repeat and propagate.  So do your bit and spread it around.

You can't battle the Left effectively with just one weapon: the whole arsenal has to be brought to bear.  Sweet reason has its uses with some, and the hard fist of unreason with others. Mockery and derision can be effective. And throw in some contumely for good measure.

Don't forget: it's a war. If they win, we lose. They never rest, and so we must be ever-vigilant. Right now the bastards are doing their best to deploy the Chinese virus against Trump and his supporters.  Their nefarious actions are legion. One is the exploitation of the crisis to empty the prisons. They had that goal all along; now they can use the Chinese virus as an excuse.  Another is to use the crisis to close down the gun stores.  

Typically leftist: take the side of the criminal element, and violate the rights of the law-abiding. There is nothing progressive about leftists: an appropriate appellation is 'transgressive.' Open the borders; empty the prisons; violate the Constitutional rights of citizens.

Anyone who identifies as liberal, left, progressive, Democrat must be met with the (defeasible) presumption of scumbaggery: they are to be presumed morally obtuse  and intellectually self-enstupidated until they prove otherwise.  They bear the onus probandi.

But the presumption is defeasible. Allow those under scrutiny the opportunity to defeat it. Be tough, but fair.

I call this the political burden of proof.  My previous formulations of it have been too polite.

Nancy the Ripper's Latest Outrage

Here

Will Leftists Now Re-Evaluate their Espousal of a "Borderless World"?

We of the Coalition of the Sane understand that one of the many reasons for enforced national borders is to impede the spread of deadly diseases. So I am hoping that such globalist nitwits as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton will learn something from COVID-19.  They will perhaps learn the importance of border control. If they do, something good will have come of the Wuhan virus.  One can hope.  Here's a report on something the illustrious Mr. Kerry said a few years back:

Taking a jab at Donald Trump for promising that Mexico would pay for a wall on the Rio Grande, the secretary [Kerry] enthused over his vision of a borderless world, and hectored those reluctant to join his flight to Utopia. Once offstage, Mr. Kerry ducked into an armored vehicle surrounded by heavily armed guards who shepherded him from one secure place to the next, and then home, where he could relax behind sturdy walls.

In other words, borders and guns for us, but not for you "bitter clingers" (Obama) and "deplorables" (Hillary). 

Just remember, folks, political correctness can get you killed. "Killed dead," as a deplorable might say.

Foolish Leftists

The political authorities are tasked with the protection of life, liberty, and property. But when the authorities abdicate, fearing the charge of 'racism,' the citizen must look to his own protection. And so the leftist foolishly works against his own interest: he wants fewer guns in civilian hands, but coddles criminals, thereby giving the citizen a reason to arm himself.

Solzhenitsyn on Gulag Interrogation

Here are some passages from The Gulag Archipelago that everyone should read.  A sample:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

Do you say that it can't happen here? Are you quite sure? Are you aware of how extreme in its hard-Leftism the Democrat party has become? Are you paying attention? Or are you lost in your private life?  If you value your private life you are well-advised to pay attention lest you wake up some morning to find that the private life is no more.

Now read this Dreher article to see that I am not exaggerating: Post Card from Pre-Totalitarian America.

Medicare for All?

Some of the Democrat candidates for president are calling for Medicare for all, in those terms. The call makes no sense. Medicare is a U. S. government program for American citizens 65 years of age and older. (There are minor exceptions that don't affect my main point.) Now even Democrats know that not every citizen is 65 or older. So the call makes no sense for that reason alone.

If the Dem dogs weren't such lying "pony soldiers" to use Joe Biden's bizarre phrase, if they were intellectually honest, then they would admit to be calling for universal health care, where 'universal' covers citizens and illegal aliens. The mendacious bunch would also own up to wanting a single-payer system, one that outlaws private health insurance. Outlawing private insurers such as Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, Aetna, etc., would do away with the supplemental plans now available to part B Medicare recipients.

Next Lie: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." (Barack Obama)

Are Fascist Antifa Thugs Blind to their Contradictory Behavior?

A re-titled and redacted version of an entry originally posted 1 September 2017. 

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Yes, says Jonathan Turley:

At Berkeley and other universities, protesters have held up signs saying “F--k Free Speech” and have threatened to beat up anyone taking their pictures, including journalists. They seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction in using fascistic tactics as anti-fascist protesters. After all, a leading definition of fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”

If there is a 'contradiction' involved here it is not logical but practical/pragmatic. In the terminology of the preceding entry, it is not an instance of logical inconsistency, but of inconsistency in the application of a principle or standard.  If the principle is "It is wrong to employ fascist tactics," then the practical contradiction consists in the Antifa thugs' application of the principle to their enemies but not to themselves.   

But then it dawned on me (thanks to some comments by Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' who cannot go by his real name because of the leftist thugs in the academic world) that there is no practical/pragmatic contradiction or double standard here. The Antifa thugs and their ilk operate with a single standard: do whatever it takes to win.

They don't give a rat's ass about consistency of any kind or the related 'bourgeois' values that we conservatives cherish such as truth.  These values are nothing but bourgeois ideology the function of which is to legitimate the 'oppressive'  institutional structures that the Marxist punks battle against.

When Turley says that the thugs "seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction" he assumes that they accept the principle but have somehow failed to realize that they are applying it inconsistently.  But that is not what is going on here. They don't accept the principle!  They have nothing against fascist tactics if they can be employed as means to their destructive ends.  But if the political authorities arrest them and punish them, as they must to maintain civil order,  then they scream Fascism! and dishonestly invoke the principle.

Besides, they don't accept the meta-principle that one ought to be consistent in the application of principles.

It is a mistake to think that one can reach these people by appealing to some values we all supposedly share. "Don't you see, you are doing the very thing you protest against!" You can't reach these evil-doers in this way. You reach them by enforcing the law. At some point you have to start breaking heads. But that is not 'fascism,' it is law enforcement.

If the authorities abdicate, if the police stand idly by while crimes against persons and property are committed, then they invite a vigilante response.  Is that what you want?

The "Fuck Free Speech" signs make it clear that the Antifa thugs do not value what we value. And because they do not share this classically liberal value, it is a mistake to say that they operate with a double standard: Free speech for me, but not for thee.  They don't value free speech at all; what they value is winning by any means. If there are times and places where upholding free speech is a means to their ends, then they uphold it. But at times and in places where shutting down free speech is instrumentally useful, then they will shut it down. 

It is right out of the Commie playbook. And just as a Nazi is not the cure for a Commie, a Commie is not the cure for a Nazi.  The cure for both is an American steeped in American values.