Maverick Philosopher

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your attitudes and values into others.

Leader of the Stack. Excerpts:

We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are.  (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor  who makes that dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)

Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name— can get your irenic self killed.

 

[. . .]

 

There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism.  For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal  is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, one-sidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.'  It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or be cancelled in one’s livelihood and then eventually in one's life.

Devon Archer: The Tucker Carlson Interview

 Part I Under 12 minutes.

Leftism Exposed

The following statement is both well-written and accurate in every particular (emphasis added):

Leftism is a totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism: everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement. But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate activity. That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal. Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educate him.

Let me add a second example to the one the author gives in illustration of the general point expressed in the italicized passage. His example is that equality of opportunity is not enough; a new goal must be posited by the 'progressive' who cannot rest content with anything, the goal of so-called 'equity' or equality of outcome, and this in defiance of the ineluctable reality of individual and group differences in attitudes and abilities.

My example is the one presently paraded before us by the so-called 'pride' contingent. Unsatisfied with being tolerated and left alone, they now demand to be accepted, affirmed, and celebrated for their depravity and corruption of children. But even this won't be enough for them: driven by a vicious intolerance at odds with the toleration they initially demanded,  they aim to replace the superior culture whose excesses spawned them and whose decadence is seemingly impotent to stop them. But it ain't over til it's over and we who are sane and reasonable have not yet begun to fight. Too many of us, lost in our private lives, have yet to wake up to the 'woke' madness. But wake up we will.  

But who made the statement quoted above?  You may be surprised.  I was. I now hasten to add that the truth of a statement and the soundness of an argument are logically  independent of the psychology of the one who makes the statement or gives the argument. To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.

Trump the Only Way Forward

Conservatives Lost the Culture War and the Trump Agenda is the Only Path Forward

Refreshingly realistic but also deeply troubling. I fear the author is right. Conservatives lost the culture war and so now: 

Conservatives do not have a viable path to political power any other way. The issues of national survival are of primary importance. There is no point in fighting a culture war if we don’t have a country in which this war can take place. [. . .]

Trying to rehash these old battles in the present political moment, when institutional Christianity no longer has any meaningful political or cultural clout, is a waste of time—at least at the national level.

COVID-19 made the weakness of American Christianity painfully clear. Protestant and Catholic churches alike overwhelmingly declared themselves nonessential during the spring of 2020. That was, sadly, merely an acknowledgement of a longstanding reality.

Virtually no one today cares what the pope or any megachurch pastor, for that matter, has to say about political and cultural life. Their endorsements do not move the needle and their influence has had little to no bearing, even on their own flocks, when it comes to preserving the older standards of Christian morality and decency.  

[. . .]

We live in a country where the president says it is antisemitic to ban trans surgery for minors. And yet you will strain yourself trying to hear any priest or pastor say a word in response. Millions of Americans are hurting, desperately confused about their very identity and sexual impulses, and the leaders of the churches have almost nothing to say. Nonessential workers indeed.

[. . .]

One wonders what purpose, at this point, the differentiation between denominations even serves. Pope Francis, just like John MacArthur, agrees with the leftist view of racism. And Tim Keller, just like Pope Francis, lauds mass immigration. On the most prominent liberal issues of our day there is total agreement among the leaders of the West’s supposedly different Christian denominations. 

America has a moral majority, all right. It’s just liberal. The Left controls every institutional power center in America. Wall Street, the media, the universities, Hollywood, the military—you name it—everywhere the liberal consensus reigns supreme. There is not a single Fortune 500 company in America, not one, that would denounce transgender surgery for minors. 

Those institutions shape the public consciousness in a way social conservatives simply cannot. Manufactured consent is real and all around us. A large portion of Americans simply accept whatever their televisions and cellphones tell them to believe no matter how perverted, wrong, or harmful. Even many of those who do not agree with it, at least bow to the moral consensus. Think of all those many millions who got vaccinated, not because they wanted to, but because their “job required it” or because they couldn’t “travel without it.”

The idea that large numbers of Americans are going to “wake up” and “push back” is simply a cope. That’s not how popular opinion works. The idea that Americans are going to see transgenderism as a bridge too far is, I think, much overhyped. I remember the gay marriage “debates,” such as they were. I remember Prop 8 passing in 2008 in California. I also remember how none of these setbacks for the Left ultimately had any bearing in the end. By 2015, gay marriage was the law of the land. Today it is untouchable liberal orthodoxy supported by a majority of Americans, including large numbers of “conservatives.”

Deploying more 10,000-word essays on teleology and the new natural law isn’t going to solve the social issue problem either. Millions of Americans didn’t start shoving dildos in orifices, guzzling sex change hormones, and consuming billions of hours of pornography a year because they read an article or heard an argument. These sexual and social perversions spring from a much deeper source, one that isn’t going to be solved by policy wrangling in D.C. think tanks. 

The spiritual crisis that afflicts the West runs far deeper than most social conservatives want to admit. They don’t understand how bad things really are, which is why they stand around, mouths agape, as they try to figure out what a “furry” is or why U.S. military officers dress up in leather “pup play” fetish gear while they sodomize each other in uniform and then post photos to social media.

In light of our ongoing moral and spiritual crisis, I fully expect that the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney controversy is merely a blip that will soon pass. In the 1990s Ikea ran the world’s first commercial featuring a gay couple. In 2022, Ikea was valued at $17 billion. Go woke, go broke? 

Sure. 

The Matt Walsh’s of the world won’t want to hear this, but trying to fight the Left on gender with desiccated Socratic arguments (“What is a woman?”) is a losing battle. Owning liberals with facts and logic is mostly a waste of time.Political power doesn’t flow from scoring debate points in the “free marketplace of ideas.” It comes from the willingness to impose one’s beliefs on others and possessing the resources to do so. 

All morality requires enforcement. 

The Left implicitly understands that point. They are more than happy to crush their opponents. Just ask Donald Trump, John Eastman, Douglas Mackey, or any of the January 6 defendants. Strip away civilization and politics boils down to the distinction between friend and enemies. [You need a reference to Carl Schmitt here, son.] That’s why the White House hosted a trans day of visibility just two days after a transgender terrorist murdered six Christians in Tennessee. 

At some point, every political regime must put its foot down. Some people think cannibalism is wrong, others think that it is right. If the former are to prevail politically they must be willing to use force against the latter. In the end, this is what morality requires. This is what morality is. 

BV: The sound point here is that morality is just a lot of impotent prescriptions and proscriptions without an enforcement mechanism. But that is not to say that might makes right.  If the enforcer is to enforce good  and not evil, then the enforcer must either be God or, here below, godly men and governments.

Conservatives and Christians today simply lack the force of will to impose their social morality on the Left. That is why they lose cultural battles and the Left wins. Conservatives aren’t even willing to mock their enemies. If you want to make “respectable” social conservatives and Christians uncomfortable, call a prostitute a “whore” in their presence. Mock OnlyFans as a den of “sluts.” Express deep revulsion at sodomy. Watch them writhe in psychic pain. 

Such firm moral condemnation, I am frequently told, is “judge-y” and “un-Christian.” “We” need to “watch our tone” as “we” seek to “draw others to the faith.” As their flock comes under attack from wolves, the shepherds condemn those who would fight back. There are many such cases. 

The deep-rooted weakness of the American Christian Right is a serious problem. I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish my fellow Christians had more spirit. I wish our leaders would lead. That isn’t the reality we have, though, as much as I may wish otherwise.

Right now, conservatives in deep red areas can still fight cultural battles at the local and state levels. Even some purple states, at the local level, still provide a way to maneuver against the Left’s cultural hegemony. Everywhere else, and at the national level especially, conservatives must sideline the cultural battles in favor of the issues of national survival.  

Trump showed that even in our degraded moral culture, a huge percentage of Americans still want the nation to survive. They don’t hate themselves despite all the propaganda to which they’ve been subjected. The old pre-World War II conservative consensus in favor of protectionism, non-intervention, and immigration restrictions is still enormously popular. 

If we win on those fronts and secure a future for our country then, and only then, will we have a chance to fight once again for the family, for our faith, and for a return of moral decency. 

That day, however, is still a long way off. We have work to do. 

 

The Biden Maladministration is Placing Us in Grave Danger

No, you useful idiots, white supremacy is not the greatest threat we face: it is no threat at all since it doesn't exist. A real threat we face, and a very serious one, is posed by an EMP directed against our unprotected grid.  HT to JSO for the following two videos. 

How would a nuclear EMP affect the power grid?

How long would society last during a total grid collapse?

Addendum 4/12:

A reader refers us to Are Aircraft Carriers Unsinkable? and comments, 

The whole article is hair-raising, but this jumped out at me:

About the same time that tensions were rising over Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, reposts of a 2020 article by Major General Ed Thomas, the Commander of the Air Force’s Recruiting Service, began to pop up in the media.  The headline?  “Eighty-six percent of Air Force pilots are white men. Here’s why this needs to change.” Too many white men? Is that what our generals worry about? Like many other military top-brass, Major General Thomas seems to think that diversity wins wars.  That’s why he put “improving diversity” on “the top of my to-do-list.”

What if, in the meritocracy the armed services are supposed to be, not enough nonwhites cut the mustard? Promote them anyway?

 

BV: This goes to the heart of the matter, namely the assault on merit in favor of 'diversity,' 'equity,' and 'inclusion'  which in practice amount to governmentally enforced proportional  representation, equality of outcome, and exclusion of 'racists' and 'white supremacists.'  The destructive DEI agenda is predicated upon reality denial, in particular, the denial of the reality that we are not equal either as individuals or as groups in those empirically measurable respects  that bear upon qualification for jobs and positions.   The DEI agenda is dangerous and destructive because it allows the physically feeble and disabled, the mentally incompetent, the morally defective, and the factually ignorant and untrained to occupy high positions in government and industry. But 'allow' is too weak a word in this context; 'promote' is more to the point.  

 

One reason this is dangerous is that our geopolitical adversaries do not subscribe to the destructive DEI ideology. While we self-enstupidate, they salivate. 

 

How explain the popularity of DEI among the useful idiots?  I suggest that it is due, at least in part, to the 'feel-good' nature of the DEI 'reforms.' They are found very appealing in this, the Age of Feeling.

 

How explain the popularity of DEI among the drivers of the demented doctrine? In the case of Major General Ed Thomas and his ilk it is probably sheer careerism. They go along not just to get along but to advance themselves career-wise, and the nation and the world be damned. It strains credulity to think that they actually believe the rubbish.

 

There's a bad moon rising, and trouble's on the way. 

Anarcho-Tyranny in the USA

Here by Auron MacIntyre at The Total State (Substack):

The city of Philadelphia has announced an agreement to pay a $9.25 million settlement in connection with the police response to protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020. While dozens were killed and billions of dollars of damage were done during the riots that raged across America for weeks in the summer of 2020, it is the participants themselves who will be paid restitution by the government.

Law and order in the United States have now descended to a level of anarcho-tyranny in which the government funds rioters with the tax money of their victims. The slow death of the rule of law in America would be ugly enough, but what we are witnessing instead is the twisted, grimacing corpse of a system that was once designed to protect the safety of Americans now being used to punish us for disagreeing with our political elites.

UPDATE 3/24

This fellow and I so far appear to be 'on the same page.' Two days ago, before I had heard of him, I spoke of our time as 

. . . a time when those in control of the state apparatus have forgotten, or rather willfully ignore, the purposes that justify government in the first place, namely, the tasks of securing the life, liberty, and property of those governed. But the Orwellian wokesters now in charge invert these values in the Orwellian manner and aid and abet those who aim at the opposite.

As MacIntyre points out, what we are witnessing is "more than the slow death of the rule of law," but the inversion of our founding values. And yet brazen liars such as Nancy Pelosi yammer on about the rule of law while her shills in the media intone in unison the scripted mantra, "No one is above the law," as they pervert the law Soviet-style to destroy Donald J. Trump.  Thankfully, Nancy dear is no longer with us (nor against us) politically speaking; others, however, far worse and more dangerous because less stupid, will take her place.

And as usual the Left Coast leads the way. (Because it is closer to China?) Here is Substacker David Zweig on lockdown and surveillance Santa Clara-style.

Does Classical Liberalism Destroy Itself?

Joe Odegaard sends us to The Orthosphere where we find Classical Liberalism Destroys Itself. The opening paragraph is stylistically brilliant, especially the concluding sentence, and I agree with the paragraph content-wise, though not with the quotation from Dreher:

“Classical liberalism detached from the Christian faith is what got us here.” 

Rod Dreher, “David French: Not Woke Enough For The Times?”  The American Conservative (Feb. 16, 2023)

The above is from a long thumb-sucker in which Dreher sadly ponders the performative conservatism of David French.  Performative conservatism means striking conservative poses rather than striking blows that actually conserve.  Performative conservatives have plenty of principles but precious few wins.  Dreher is himself what Sam Francis called a “beautiful loser,” which is to say a conservative pundit who is admired for his prose, his erudition, his broadmindedness, and his many, many friends on the left, but who is not and cannot be admired for success.  French and Dreher are the spiritual sons of George Will, a belletristic bimbo and court clown who went down fighting by the Queensbury Rules.

As I said, brilliant writing and a delightful skewering of that yap-and-scribble lap dog of the Left, George Will, of the Beltway bow-tie brigade. There is only one mistake: the rules are Queensberry, not Queensbury. My pedantry having now been satisfied, I proceed to the substantive issues.  My disagreement begins with the second paragraph:

Classical liberalism is detached from Christian faith because classical liberalism detached Christian faith from public life. It did this intentionally and by design. Does Dreher really not understand that the first task of classical liberalism was to liberate men and women from classical Christianity. Some emancipated Christians went straight to atheism while others chose a couple of generations of decompression in the halfway house of liberal Christianity. Many worked as thoughtful Christian conservative columnists who believe that the United States was not really a Christian country until passage of the Fourteenth, perhaps Nineteenth, amendment.

The bias of the author surfaces with "the first task of classical liberalism was to liberate men and women from classical Christianity." Not so. The task was to separate church and state, not to "liberate" men and women from "classical" Christianity. What does "liberate" mean here? And what is "classical" Christianity? Roman Catholicism? Some form of Protestantism? The author is attributing nefarious motives to the Founders who were classical liberals and men of the Enlightenment.  A government that is neutral on such theological questions as the divinity of Jesus Christ and the tri-unity of God and that allows for freedom of religion and the freedom to practice no religion is not inimical to Christianity but tolerant of different forms of Christianity as well as tolerant of other religions and of those who practice no religion. 

There may be some truth in Dreher’s proposition that classical liberalism only works so long as the United States contains a great many Christians. But that is just additional evidence that classical liberalism destroys itself. It is a simple and obvious historical fact that Christians fare no better under classical liberalism than they fared under the Roman Emperor Nero. The disappearance of Christians under the former is not so swift and sanguinary as under the latter, but it is equally certain.

The "obvious fact" is neither obvious nor a fact. Would the author prefer to be a practicing Christian under Nero or under Biden? Christians obviously fare better now under Biden and those who pull the puppet's strings than they did under Nero.  And the talk of "equal certainty" is a wild exaggeration. Undoubtedly, Christianity is presently under assault. That is an obvious fact.  But there is no necessity that Christianity succumb. There is no inevitability at work here.

More importantly, there is nothing in the nature of classical liberalism that necessitates that Christians be forced into latter-day catacombs.  After all, the touchstone of classical liberalism is toleration. Toleration is part of the very essence of classical liberalism. That toleration extends to Jews, Christians, and even Muslims if the latter renounce Sharia (Islamic law), which is incompatible with the principles and values of classical liberalism. Toleration has limits.  Perhaps the thought of people like the author is that if you tolerate many different views, then you must tolerate all, including the view that Christianity must be destroyed. But the inference from Many to All is a non sequitur. Logically viewed, all slippery slope arguments are invalid.   If we tolerate the consumption of alcoholic beverages, must we also tolerate drunk driving? Obviously not.  To tolerate drinking is not to tolerate drunkenness, let alone drunk driving. To tolerate drinking by adults is not to tolerate drinking by children. To tolerate private inebriation is not to tolerate public inebriation. And so on.  A government that tolerates sodomy in private between consenting adults can also tolerate the existence of private schools in which it is taught that sodomy is a mortal sin.  Why not?

Besides the Many to All fallacy, there is also the fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this.) From the fact that classically liberal government has been followed temporally by the decadence and insanity all around us (wide open national borders, celebration of worthless individuals, destruction of monuments to great men, the institutionally-mandated DEI agenda, et cetera ad nauseam) it does not follow logically that the first is the cause of the second.

Dreher admits as much when he writes

“I cannot imagine a form of government and a social compact that most of us can consent to, that upholds classical liberal standards without a broadly shared religion..”

Nor can I.  I cannot imagine that form of government and social compact because classical liberal standards necessarily destroy a broadly shared religion.  Classical liberalism destroys a broadly shared religion because it removes all civil disabilities from apostates and infidels.  The natural result is that there are more of both and the broadly shared religion disappears.

I disagree with Dreher. We don't need a broadly shared religion; what we need is a minimal conception of the common good to which most of us can consent, whether we are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, etc.  Of course, the commonality of a broadly shared religion freely subscribed to by its adherents would greatly enhance comity.  Imagine the social harmony and social cohesion we would all enjoy if each of us, sincerely, and without coercion, subscribed to and lived by the Baltimore Catechism!  But that is hopelessly utopian. Our Protestant brethren would surely raise a stink to high heaven.

I even more strongly disagree with the author. We are being told that classical liberalism "necessarily destroys a broadly shared religion because it removes all civil disabilities [liabilities?] from apostates and infidels." First of all, where does this necessity come from? There is no necessity or inevitability at work here.  That's the slippery-slope trope once more. And again, to tolerate broadly shared religions is not to destroy them.  And what exactly is the author proposing? A politically totalitarian theocracy? What  then  would he do with the "apostates" and "infidels"?   What penalties would he exact? Would he support a throne-and-altar form of 'woke cancellation'? 

To mask the disappearance of the broadly shared religion, our court clowns and progressive propagandists have invented preposterous pseudo-religions like Judeo-Christianity, or now “People of Faith.”  What this shows is that our broadly shared religion is that there shall be no broadly shared religion—classical liberalism, in short.

I agree that there is no such specific religion as Judeo-Christianity, but by that reasoning there is no such specific religion as Christianity either given the manifold sects and doctrinal divergences. My friend Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion, is a unitarian, a denier of the divinity of Christ, and someone who thinks (gasp!) that Platonism has nothing to contribute to Christianity. And he has said bad things about Trump in my presence. But he is probably a better Christian than me in some ways.

And surely it is a slovenly misuse of 'religion' to refer to classical liberalism as a religion. Call it an ersatz religion if you like, but note that an ersatz X is precisely not an X. A salt substitute such as potassium chloride is not table salt (sodium chloride).

The irony is that Dreher knows this and says as much when he writes about Christianity and not politics.  Christianity cannot survive as a broadly shared religion if it does not possess a political community in which apostasy comes at a price, and from which infidels are rigorously excluded.  Classical liberalism forbids both of these necessary measures, and this is why Christianity and classical liberalism both are doomed.

This is doubly mistaken. Christianity can easily survive as a broadly shared religion under a limited, constitutionally-based government whose provisions secure, inter alia, religious liberty. No politically totalitarian theocracy is need to assure Christianity's survival.  Toleration and limited government suffice. Of course, we have neither now. So what we have to do is get back to American conservatism which includes a sizable admixture of classical liberalism. I understand what animates those on the Reactionary Right, just as I understand what inspires those on the Alternative Right who, unlike the Orthospherians, think that Christianity is the problem, it having weakened us and made us unfit for living in this world, the only one (they think) there is. But both of these right turns lead to dead ends. There will be no return to throne-and-altar conservatism.  

Finally, neither Christianity nor classical liberalism are doomed. Again the inevitability 'argument' which is akin to the slippery-slope trope, and the fallacies of Many to All, and post hoc ergo propter hoc.   That being said, things in the near-term look bad indeed, and I am none too sanguine about turning things around and returning to America as she was founded to be.

A Good Insight into the CIA

Here:

A right-wing reflex, albeit one attenuated by each new betrayal, has been to trust the “patriots” in the intelligence community working tirelessly to protect us from foreign threats. But future presidents must remember that the CIA was born in the era when the modern American administrative state was being built and beginning to feel its powers. This may have been a necessary evil in the face of the challenge posed by the highly centralized and bureaucratic Soviet intelligence services. Nevertheless, any capable and public-spirited leader must always remember that America’s foreign intelligence apparatus has an innate prejudice in favor of its own corporate and partisan interests as well as the ever-leftward trajectory of the American administrative state as a whole.

Homo Americanus: The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy in America

Ordered yesterday, arrived today. That's what I call service. Only in America, but then what's with the 'wokery' of Bezos and the boys?  Turn the USA into a Soviet-style shithole and then what motive would anyone have to innovate? A bit of a paradox. Did the US defeat the SU to become SU 2?

By Zbigniew Janowski.  I found the reference in Political Ponerology.  Afterword by Ryszard Legutko, the author of The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, Encounter Books, 2016, 2018. It entered my library on 14 February 2021, a gift from Brian Bosse.  

Should we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable be supporting Amazon with our purchases? I started a post on that question a while ago.  It languishes in the queue. 

Addendum. Dave Bagwill recommends Alistair Elder, The Red Trojan Horse: A Concise Analysis of Cultural Marxism, 2017. Also available via Amazon.