Maverick Philosopher

The Ultimate Orwellianism

The ultimate Orwellianism is to refer to the terminally benighted as 'woke.'

The Albatross and the Donkey

Joe Biden is and will remain an albatross around the neck of the Democrat jackass.

Why Tulsi Gabbard is Leaving the Democrat Party and Why You Should Too

Here at Substack. HT: Anthony Flood. Full text follows. Please propagate. Do your bit to restore some sanity to this country and to the world. 

Why I'm leaving the Democratic Party

Tulsi Gabbard

 

I love our country. Our God-given rights of freedom, life, and liberty enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights are my inspiration. I answered the call to duty and took an oath, dedicating my life to supporting and defending those freedoms, both in uniform and in public office.

Growing up in Hawaii gave me a special appreciation of our home, water, and precious natural resources.  So when I was 21 years old I decided to run for Hawaii State House so that I could be in a position to protect our environment.  I wasn’t politically affiliated before that, but as I was about to file my election papers, I had to choose which party to affiliate with. 

As I did my research, I was inspired by Democrats who stood up against the war in Vietnam, and those who fought for Hawaii’s plantation workers who were being abused and exploited by wealthy landowners. I was inspired by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and drawn to the ideals of a big-tent Democratic Party that stood up for working men and women — the little guy.  In contrast, the Republican Party seemed like one that stood for the interests of big business and warmongering elites.  So I became a Democrat and remained one for over 20 years — an independent Democrat to be sure, but a Democrat nonetheless. 

I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.

Here are some of the main reasons I’m leaving the Democratic Party, in brief. I’ll be tackling each of these in more depth in the coming weeks.

The pro-war Democratic Party has led us to the brink of nuclear war. The party is led by warmongers who are firmly in the grip of the military industrial complex, and don’t know or care about the cost of war, or who pays the price. President Biden and Democratic Party elite have pushed us to the precipice of nuclear war, risking starting WWIII and destroying the world as we know it. This is the most urgent existential threat we face. I ran for President in 2020 because I knew that this is where we were headed. All the signs were there. I raised this issue every day during the campaign, and on the national debate stage. But politicians and the media ignored it. They didn’t care then, and they don’t care now. Obviously I didn’t win that election, and don’t have the power to do what is necessary to prevent it. President Biden and Congress do. But they irresponsibly refuse to use that power to protect the safety of our country, the American people, and the world from the devastation of a nuclear holocaust. To protect our loved ones, our children, our world, I’m calling upon the American people to join me in standing up to these cowardly politicians now. This may be our last chance to do so.

 

Leftist Omni-Politicization

For the Left, everything is either political or to be politicized, including that which is non-political. Take this to its logical extreme and you end up with 'woke' mathematics. This reductio ad absurdum will cause a sane person to reject the premise. The sane will point out that some things, by their very nature, cannot be politicized. There is nothing political about the Poisson distribution or Rolle's theorem.

 

Will the leftist back off? Hell no, he will deny that anything has a nature, and affirm that everything is subject to social construction. For example, a typical leftist will state that a conservative black is a traitor to his race. Now that makes no sense. 'Traitor' is a political notion; 'race' is not. Race is not like political affiliation. You can quit your party, and if you are a Democrat you should; you can't, however, quit your race. Not even Rachel Dolezal could pull it off.

 

Being a leftist, however, means that you don't have to make sense. Herewith, a case of 'leftist privilege,' to give it a name.

 

You say you've forgotten who Rachel Dolezal is is? Too much Twitter! A weapon of mass distraction. Soon you'll be a tweeting twit with a mind fit only to flit.  The Left is all about the erasure of memory, collective and individual, except for what serves their agenda. To refresh your memory, see Rachel Dolezal, The Black White Woman.

 

I make a mistake at the end that I will now correct. I represent Elizabeth Warren as the author of Pow Wow Chow when in fact she is merely a contributor to that by-now-famous recipe book. Her contribution, however, a recipe for lobster bisque — Cherokees were into haute cuisine? — was plagiarized!

The 'Progressive'

A 'progressive' is one who has made no progress in understanding the world. If he had, he would understand that his proposed changes are not improvements.  This assumes, charitably, that he understands the difference between 'change' and 'improvement.'

Truth is not a Leftist Value

Posted today on my Facebook page. I could not resist making some additions for the present venue.

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My title is a Dennis Prager riff. But it needs a bit of nuancing, a job for a philosopher, not a talk show host.  Truth is a value for leftists in an instrumental sense: they will tell the truth if it serves their agenda. If it doesn't, they feel justified in lying. So perhaps we should say that for a leftist, truth is not an absolute value. They don't respect it as an objectively binding norm.

 

For a leftist, especially the 'woke' species thereof, truth is simply a matter of perspective: it is the perspective of a particular power-hungry individual or tribe. The perspective is true to the extent that it enhances the power of the power-unit whose perspective it is.

 

The underlying metaphysics and epistemology is Nietzschean. Now this here's Facebook, and not the place to get all academic. But perhaps now you understand why a leftard like the Ladder Man is enamored of Nietzsche.

 

Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders!

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit is die Steigerung des Machtgefühls! 

 

"The world is the Will to Power and nothing besides!"

"The criterion of truth is the increase in the feeling of power."

It is also worth pointing out that coherence is not a leftist value either. Lefties say all sorts of things that make no sense in pursuit of their agenda. For example, "Walls are immoral." (Pelosi); "Diversity is our strength." (Pelosi and numerous other leftards.) Here too the absolute-instrumental distinction kicks in.

 

The problem with "Walls are immoral" is not that it is false, but that it makes no sense, and therefore does not satisfy a necessary condition of a proposition's having a truth-value. A wall cannot be either moral or immoral; only a person who uses a wall for one purpose or another.

 

But try explaining that to a destructive knucklehead like Madame Speaker! You won't get through to her because power is the cynosure of her political machinations. She was always a dingbat, but now she is a dingbat wrapped in senility. And a clear and present danger to the Republic, as witness her ill-advised Taiwan junket.

 

A decrepit donkey should not poke a dragon with a stick.

Are We the Government?

"We the people are the government." (Joe Biden) Barack Obama used to spout that same falsehood. "The government is us."

 

It is a nice question whether they were lying or bullshitting.  The liar cares enough about the truth to want to hide it from us. The bullshitter doesn't care about the truth and will say anything. I borrow the distinction from Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, a book undoubtedly more purchased than read.  It is a fine piece of analysis, but probably beyond the grasp of those who have 'twitterized' their attention spans.

 

The government is not us. It is an entity distinct from most of us, and opposed to many if not most of us, run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry individuals who may have started out with good intentions but who were soon suborned by the power, perquisites, and pelf of high office, people for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle.

 

Government likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, who are not part of the government, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.  Not that proper regulation is likely now under 'woke' capitalism.  But this is a large and separate topic.

 

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government. To do so is not anti-government. Leftists love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government. It is a lie and they know it. They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government. But truth is not their concern; winning is. To their way of thinking the glorious end justifies the shabby means.

Face Masks

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

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

A Timid Plea for Freedom of Speech

JULIUS EVOLA wrote a fascinating introduction to Pali Buddhism. You say Evola was a fascist? Well, Jean-Paul Sartre was a Stalinist; Gottlob Frege was an anti-Semite (according to Michael Dummett); Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were members of the Nazi Party. Are those affiliations good reasons to not read these great authors? Not to a sane person. Only to an anti-civilizational termite.

 

No book burning, no de-platforming! Stand up for free speech and open inquiry! To hell with the Left and its index librorum prohibitorum.

 

To hell with the Democrat Party.

What is the Most Pernicious of the Left's Errors?

Contemporary leftists (cultural Marxists) deny that there is a reality antecedent to our classifications and conceptualizations. (V. I. Lenin was of course an exception along with other classical Marxists.) Everything becomes a socio-political construct. How convenient for identity-political totalitarians! The bird of reality can be carved up in any way that suits the will to power of some interest group -- because there is no bird to carve. Avis rara in excelsis!

 

Next stop: the Twilight Zone.

 

Rachel Dolezal is black. Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Warren, a.k.a. 'Fauxcahontas,' despite her contribution of a recipe for lobster bisque to Pow Wow Chow, that must-have cookbook for the bien- pensant, is the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Continuing in the alimentary mode, Warren cooked her own goose anent her presidential pretensions, and is now 'toast.'

 

But why can't a cooked goose 're-imagine' herself as toast?

A Response to Liccione on Border Enforcement

From my Facebook page, 22 March 2019

 

Michael Liccione writes,

 

Totally open borders would be a surrender of sovereignty. Totally closed borders would be inhumane. There must surely be a via media that would be neither. But Washington seems unable to define it, because both Capitol Hill and the White House see more to be gained by political posturing than by working together on finding it. And that, my friends, is the problem--in this area as in so many others.

 

1. Who is for totally closed borders? No conservative of note. Certainly not Trump. Conservatives oppose illegal immigration, but not legal immigration. Nor do they oppose asylum provisions. They oppose the misuse thereof.

 

2. You can't look for a *via media* where there is a false alternative.

 

3. There is no moral equivalence between Capitol Hill and the White House. The House Dems and the the anti-Trump Republicans are pursuing a dangerous and morally irresponsible course. Trump is not posturing. He is doing what must be done under the circumstances.

 

4. Work together? Come on Michael Liccione. I don't mean this personally. I like you and I respect you. But, with all due respect, you are not thinking clearly. You can't work together with a Speaker of the House who incoherently babbles about walls being immoral and her colleagues who wax Orwellian in their advocacy of border security without border barriers. You can't work together with political opponents whose transparent motive is to win demographically by flooding the country with 'undocumented Democrats.'

 

5. One last shot. Some 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam over a 20 year period. Some 70,000 American died of drugs last year alone due in large part to a porous border. Does that concern you? And that is JUST ONE problem with lax border enforcement.

 

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And now, three years later, it is easy to see just how right Trump was on all the issues Biden is wrong on. Biden has proven to be a disaster on all fronts, foreign and domestic.  The United States and the world are incalculably worse off now than they were when Donald J. Trump was president.  In particular, had he been reelected, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.

 

Weakness invites aggression, especially when amalgamated with senility and leftist nonsense.

Truth and Power

'Speaking truth to power' is a phrase leftists love when they are out of power; in power, they exercise it, and truth be damned. They imbibed mendacity with their mothers' milk.

Neither Piety nor Polemic

Neither piety nor polemic belong in philosophy proper.

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Commentary:

0) No proper aphorism is an aphorism if it explains itself  or gives reasons for its own truth. And yet a good aphorism is the tip of an iceberg of thought susceptible of commentary.

1) So when I, as a philosopher, speak of God, I never use the pious 'He' but only 'he.' Of course I hold no brief against piety as such. Indeed, our society is in steep decline in part because of a lack of piety, reverence, respect, and cognate virtues.  A sign of decline is the widespread use of 'irreverent' as a term of praise. The hard Left's erasure of collective historical memory via the destruction of monuments and memorials is premised on a dangerous lack of respect for our forebears and what they bequeathed to us and and has stood the test of time. 

2) Philosophy is a conversation among friends who seek the truth together and who love the truth more than they love one another. There is simply no place for the polemic of deeds or the polemic of words among friends. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.  The Latin saying is often taken as a gloss on Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a10-20, where the Stagirite distances himself from the theory of Forms. But one finds the thought already in Plato's Republic at 595b-c and 607c.

3) That philosophy is a conversation among friends holds for political philosophy as well, since it too is philosophy and is not to be confused with politics. Whether or not Carl Schmitt is right that the essence of the political resides in the opposition Freund (friend) - Feind (enemy),  political action and discourse is almost always, even if only accidentally, polemical. It is a mistake to confuse politics with political philosophy.

4) I tend to alliterate. Is this a stylistic defect? I don't think so, but in matters literary as in matters of the palate, de gustibus non est disputandum. You have a right to your contrary opinion if contrary it is.

5) Philosophy proper is not to be confused with what passes for philosophy among the paid professors of the subject. To know what it is and what it is capable of you must not merely consult but work through the works of the great philosophers appropriating their mindset as you proceed. Ralph Waldo Emerson exaggerates with his "Plato is philosophy and philosophy Plato," but it is an exaggeration in the right direction.

The 'Liberal'

She knows how to signal her virtue, but not her turns or lane changes. 

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats

The main purposes of government are to protect life, liberty, and property. Subsidiary purposes are subordinate to the Lockean triad. This is lost on the present-day  Democrat party which has been hijacked by the hard Left.  Despite what they say, they are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property. So if you value life, liberty, and property, then you must not vote for any Democrat.  Why 'any'? Because Democrat politicians are under party discipline and toe the party line. The one or two exceptions prove the rule. Because these exceptions are few and not reliably exceptional, my rule stands.

 

The Republicans in their timid way do stand for life, liberty, and property. Or at least some of them do. And they have become less timid under Trump's tutelage. Lindsey Graham, for one,  located his manly virtue and put it to work during the Kavanaugh confirmation. His recent behavior is less inspiring. In any case, the choice is clear. Vote Republican, never vote for any Democrat, and don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party candidates.  As for the third point, you must never forget that politics is praxis, not theoria. What matters is not to have the best theory, but the best implementable theory.  No implementation of policy without power. No power without winning. Win, gain power, implement ameliorative policies.  If you don't have your hands on the levers of power, you are just another talker like me.  Two other related maxims.

 

First, it is folly to let the best become the enemy of the good. Second, politics is never about perfect versus imperfect, but about better versus worse. You find Trump deficient in gravitas? Well, so do I and defective in other ways to boot. But he was better than the alternative in 2016 and he will be better than the alternative in 2024. (And thank you, Sleepy Joe, for making Trump's virtues and accomplishments stand out so clearly.)

 

I will now briefly list some, but not all, of the reasons why the Democrats are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property despite any mendacious protests to the contrary.

 

ANTI-LIFE. The Dems are the abortion party. They support abortion on demand at every stage of fetal development. They are blind to the moral issues that abortion raises. They absurdly think that abortion is merely about women's health and reproductive rights. They are not ashamed to embrace such Orwellian absurdities as that abortion is health care. To make matters worse, they violate the sincerely held and cogently argued beliefs of fellow taxpayers by their support of taxpayer funding for abortion.  You will recall that the 'devout Catholic' Joe Biden reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment. He showed once again who and what he is, a political opportunist grounded in no discernible principles, not to mention a brazen liar whose mendacity is now compounded by being  non compos mentis, not of sound mind.  

 

ANTI-LIBERTY. The Dems are opposed to free speech, religious liberty, and self-defense rights. They regularly conflate free speech with 'hate speech' and religious liberty with 'theocracy.' And this while going soft on genuine theocratic regimes such as Iran's. All of this puts them at odds with the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. And in general we can say that contemporary Democrats are anti-Constitutional inasmuch as an open or living constitution, which they advocate, is no constitution at all, but a mere tabula rasa they hope to deface with their anti-American leftist ideology.

 

ANTI-PROPERTY. Today's Democrats, as hard leftists, are ever on the slouch toward socialism, which, in full flower (to put it euphemistically) requires central planning and government ownership of the means of production. That is where they want to go even though, as stealth ideologues, they won't admit it.

 

But let's assume that the statement I just made is exaggerated and that Dems really don't want socialism as it is classically defined. Still, they are anti-property in various ways. They think that we the people have to justify our keeping whereas government doesn't have to justify its taking. That is precisely backwards. They don't appreciate that the government exists for us; we don't exist for the government. They confuse taxation with wealth redistribution. And by the way, the government is not us, as Barack Obama has said. 'The government is us' is as perversely knuckle-headed as 'Diversity is our strength.' The latter stupidity is plainly Orwellian. What about the former? Pre-Orwellian? 

 

Finally, you need to understand that private property is the foundation of individual liberty.

Honor thy Mother

Our biological mothers bore us into the world of matter; the mother tongue into the realm of objective spirit. Both deserve respect and honor, the latter more so than the former inasmuch as the spirit is higher than the flesh.  What the mother tongue  receives from the matricidal Left is neglect and abuse and Orwellian subversion and distortion. Ingratitude and retromingency are marks of the leftist. To the Left's retromingency in point of pissing on the past I now add the retromingency of the Left's pollution of the headwaters of its expressivity.

Vito Caiati on David Brooks

I solicited Dr Caiati's comments on David Brooks' Atlantic piece, What Happened to American Conservatism?  The lede reads: "The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression." That is a good tip-off to the quality of the article. Here is what Vito said, and I agree:

I am not the right person to write a response, since I have nothing but contempt for Brooks, whom I regard as a miserable opportunist at the service of the Left. (He is precisely the sort of creature that makes an ad hominem attack, usually best avoided, entirely appropriate.)  Any man who writes,

I’m content, as my hero Isaiah Berlin put it, to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. If its progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is

is either delusional for thinking that such a “moderate wing” actually exists and that “the party as a whole” is an entity that fosters national comity and is actually concerned for the welfare of the citizenry or, in my view, is simply acting in bad faith.  No true conservative of whatever stripe can have anything to do with this intellectually and morally bankrupt party, which is entirely dominated by the Left and which wages an unceasing war against the very traditions, customs, and legal system that Brooks supposedly values so highly. 

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Now for my two cents. Useful idiots such as Brooks are worse than hard leftists. They live in the past, blind to the present, and unwittingly advance the very causes that they, as conservatives, are supposed to be opposing.   Here is what I had to say four years ago. The passage of time has only reinforced my points:

The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading.  But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-­political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

Come on, man.  Don't be stupid.  The Left is out to suppress religious liberty.  This didn't start yesterday.  You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies.  Is that a legitimate use of state power?  And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue  Hillary will do if she gets power. It is not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it.  They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane.  What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?

The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion. Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftists  like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.  

The threat from the Left is very real indeed.  See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian. 

Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark

Posted on my Facebook page, two years ago. I nailed it then, and it stays nailed down. Nancy has declined in the last two years. She seems on the verge of  joining Sleepy Joe in the land of non compos mentis.

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Donald Trump famously referred to MS-13 gangsters as "animals." That's not the way I would put it inasmuch as it is an insult to animals who, unlike the gangbangers, are beneath good and evil. But Trump talks like a working stiff and we all know what he meant. Pelosi, however, took umbrage, protesting that the murderous bunch possesses "the divine spark" (her phrase) along with the rest of us. I don't disagree, but I do have a couple of questions for Madame Speaker.

 

First, Nancy dear, do you think the pre-natal also have the divine spark? If not, why not? Isn't that what your Catholic religion, bits of which you regularly inject into your speeches, teaches? And if the horrific rapes, murders, beheadings, etc. of the MS-13 do not cause them to forfeit the "divine spark," then how it it that a human fetus' lack of development prevents it from having said spark?

 

Second, as a leftist committed to driving every vestige of religion, or rather Christianity, from the public square, can't you see that it is inconsistent of you to use themes from your Catholic girlhood when it suits you and your obstructionist purposes? You come across as a silly goose of a dingbat. Or is that just an airhead act to mask your mendacity and subversiveness and Alinskyite disregard for double standards?

An Unedifying Spectacle

Polemics has a place in politics, but in philosophy?

Feser versus Hart.

Protesters?

BLM and Antifa members are 'protesters' in the same sense in which Rodney King was a 'motorist,' Trayvon Martin was 'a child on the way to the candy store,' Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri was an 'unarmed teenager,' and Adolf Hitler was a 'statesman.'

Politics as Polemics: The Converse Clausewitz Principle

Would that I could avoid this political stuff.  But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country and its Western heritage be destroyed -- the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. 'Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife  is certainly at the root of politics.  Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it.  What one takes to be the truth: that is the problem in a nutshell.  Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and non-negotiably.  There is no common ground left, and if you think otherwise, you are fooling yourself.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the Converse Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

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

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

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

Would that I could avoid this political stuff.  But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country and its Western heritage be destroyed -- the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. 'Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife  is certainly at the root of politics.  Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it.  What one takes to be the truth: that is the problem in a nutshell.  Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and non-negotiably.  There is no common ground left, and if you think otherwise, you are fooling yourself.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the Converse Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

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

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

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

Don't Talk Like a 'Liberal'!

When you do, you validate their obfuscatory and question-begging jargon.

For example, leftists believe in something they call 'hate speech.' As they use the phrase, it covers legitimate dissent.

It is foolish for a conservative to say that he is for 'hate speech,' or that 'hate speech' is protected speech. Dennis Prager has been known to make this mistake. We conservatives are for open inquiry  and the right to dissent. Put it that way, in positive terms.

If leftists take our dissent as 'hateful,' that is their presumably willful misapprehension. We shouldn't validate it.

Don't let leftists frame the debate. He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.

The Coronal Threat is Overblown . . .

. . . and is being exploited by the fascists of the Left to clamp down on our civil liberties, weaken the Trump economy and with it President Trump's re-election chances,  and to destroy the Republic to prepare the way for socialism. Or is it the multi-pronged claim I just bruited that is overblown?  You will have to decide that for yourself. But the recent scumbaggery of leftists such as Nancy 'the Ripper' Pelosi (see my man Hanson infra for a listing of some of her recent outrages) allows us no confidence in their probity.  They are to be presumed guilty until proven innocent. Such is required by my political burden of proof.  Better safe than sorry when dealing with leftist swine and their deadly flu.

I now hand off to Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn (bolding added):

But do you know the odds of any American getting this virus?  One would think that number is easily known or available.  It’s not. A lot of digging into various municipal data portals reveals, based on the population tested, that rates can vary from, at most, eight-tenths of a percent in New York City to two-one-hundredths of a percent in Phoenix. [.02 %]

Did you know the chances of recovery from the coronavirus are about 98%—if you catch it?  Did you know there are models showing 50% of the population may have already had it, never knew they had it, and recovered?  Again, one would think this data would be widely available and reported.  It isn’t. What is presented widely are numbers and warnings that scare and frighten us, and we are now being conditioned to a lot of panic and speculation.  But part of the reason we are getting conditioned to a lot of panic is because of the wide range of speculation about other numbers we accept as our new fright-inducing reality, an increasingly confusing and frenzied set of numbers.  And the normalization of our panic is having dire consequences and augurs for even worse.

[. . .]

Is it too much to ask for some perspective with numbers we do know about, numbers which have never shut down our country, much less a church or synagogue, much less entire industries; numbers which have never restricted travel or put this nation into one big frenzy? In any given month in America, we lose about 54,000 Americans to heart disease; 50,000 to cancer; 14,000 to asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema; 12,000 to stroke; 10,000 to Alzheimer’s; 7,000 to diabetes; 5,600 to drug overdoses; and 4,700 to influenza and pneumonia. Since February, in America, coronavirus: 9,500. Where is the sympathy for the victims and families of those other causes of death? The daily mortality count? The blaring headlines? The upending of the country? We hear almost nothing about them. Those deaths give us over 157,000 deaths a month. Given all that is being done about one cause of death, COVID-19, it turns out this is a very advantaged disease, indeed. And we will in time develop a vaccine for it, not to mention more and more good news coming in the short term about treatments from other extant medicines like hydroxychloroquine.

Read it all.  And don't forget: people will die from the economic depression caused by the draconian lockdown. It is morally moronic to opine, as NY Governor Cuomo did, that the extreme measures are justified if they save just one life.

Was Jesus a Socialist?

No way! He actually fed people.

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

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.

Better R.E.D. than Dead!

Remove every Democrat!

Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark

Donald Trump famously referred to MS-13 gangsters as "animals." That's not the way I would put it inasmuch as it is an insult to animals who, unlike the gangbangers, are beneath good and evil. But Trump talks like a working stiff and we all know what he meant. Pelosi, however, took umbrage, protesting that the murderous bunch possesses "the divine spark" (her phrase) along with the rest of us. I don't disagree, but I do have a couple of questions for Madame Speaker.

First, Nancy dear, do you think the pre-natal also have the divine spark? If not, why not? Isn't that what your Catholic religion, bits of which you regularly inject into your speeches, teaches? And if the horrific rapes, murders, beheadings, etc. of the MS-13 do not cause them to forfeit the "divine spark," then how it it that a human fetus' lack of development prevents it from having said spark?

Second, as a leftist committed to driving every vestige of religion, or rather Christianity, from the public square, can't you see that it is inconsistent of you to use themes from your Catholic girlhood when it suits you and your obstructionist purposes?

You come across as a silly goose of a dingbat. Or is that just an act to mask your mendacity and subversiveness and Alinskyite disregard of double standards?

Is 'Again' a Racist 'Dog Whistle'?

We must never forget the contemptibly vile things that regressive 'progressives' and illiberal 'liberals' say about us. This is a repost from 25 May 2016.

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

Some liberal-left idiot is arguing that 'again' in Donald Trump's 'Make America Great Again' is a racist 'dog whistle.'  The suggestion is that Trump wants to bring back slavery and Jim Crow.  This is yet another proof that there is nothing so vile and contemptible and fundamentally stupid that some liberal won't embrace it.  If you think I go too far when I refer to contemporary liberals as moral scum, it is incidents like this that are part of  my justification. 

Mark Steyn supplies some other 'dog whistles' for your delectation:

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans use "Chicago" as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague Lawrence O'Donnell pronounced "golf" a racist code word. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was "working to earn a spot on the PGA tour," O'Donnell brilliantly perceived that subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word "golf" is subliminally associated with "Tiger Woods," and the word "Tiger" is not-so-subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers, former porn star Holly Sampson, etc, etc. So by using the word "golf" you're sending a racist dog whistle that Obama is a sex addict who reverses over fire hydrants.

I must reiterate my principle of the Political Burden of Proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Which Side Are You On?

It is an appropriate question to ask in politics, though not in philosophy. Politics is warfare. If you call yourself conservative and don't support Trump, then you are helping the enemy. Which side are you on?

In philosophy we strive for objectivity. We take our time; we consider all points of view. We show respect for our interlocutors. We are civil. But one cannot be objective or civil in a fight for one's life and way of life especially if one's way of life includes free speech, open inquiry, and resistance to the Left's totalitarian politicization and ideologization of everything, including pure mathematics!  One has to secure, with blood and iron if need be, the space of objective inquiry against the ideologues who, at the present time, are chiefly leftists and Islamists, and who wittingly or unwittingly work together. 

You don't like the vulgar Trump? Tough shit. He's all we've got. Face reality and its limitations. Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. The milque-toast McCains haven't done jack and won't do jack, except talk and obstruct. David Horowitz:

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)

Trump alone, an outsider who doesn't need a job, has the civil courage and is in a position to deliver the needed punches. That's why we like him. That's why we overlook his flaws. He punches back.

Addendum 11/5

Here are ten reasons to like Trump from a female legal immigrant and 'person of color.' Those are sneer quotes, by the way. Do you know the differences among sneer, mention, and quotation quotes?

Elizabeth Warren: "That's not Who We Are!"

This stock leftist exclamation, silly as it is, is sillier still coming from the mouth of the Cherokee Maiden, Fauxcahontas herself, who doesn't know who she is!

Hey 'Liberal'!

Either STFU about Nazis or report the crimes of the Commies.

The Facebook Offload

I have offloaded a good deal of my political linkage, 'rantage,' and commentary onto my FB page. But given the state of the Republic, it is important to punch back against the destructive Left in every venue and from every platform. So I will continue to post political material here.  You may try to avoid the political, but don't expect it to reciprocate.  You may seek to evade the totalitarians and retreat into your private life, but it is the nature of  totalitarians to seek total control.  Retreat into your private life, and you  may wake up one day to find that there is no private life.

Free speech! Use it or lose it. But the Constitution that protects our rights is just paper without a certain backup element:

Yes, I Repeat Myself

Leftists constantly repeat their lies in the hope that they will be eventually taken for truths. So we of the Coalition of the Sane need to constantly repeat truths.  Not our truths, for there is  no such thing as 'our' truth or 'my' truth or 'your' truth.'  Truth is not subject to ownership. If you have it, you have it without possessing it.   

So speak the truth and speak it often.  Don't be afraid of repeating yourself. Living well is impossible without repetition. All learning, all teaching, all physical culture, all musicianship require repetition. No mastery of anything, no improvement in anything, is possible without repetition.  Can you play that riff the same way every time? If not, keep practicing. 

By practicing blows, whether verbal or physical, you learn how to land effective ones.

JUST OVER THE TRANSOM: THE SELECTED WORKS OF CESARE PAVESE

Whatever you say about Jeff Bezos & Co., Amazon's service is amazonianly amazing. I order a book. They promise delivery in two days. It arrives the next day. Would that happen in a socialist shit hole, Bernie? Could a company such as Amazon even get off the ground in such a politically feculent locale as Cuba? You and your ilk didn't build that, Obama.

There ought to be one nation on the face of the earth that celebrates the individual and his liberty. 'Diversity' demands it, don't you think?

Capitalism works. Socialism doesn't. Am I opposed to all government regulation? Of course not.

You say capitalism has its origin in greed? No more than socialism has its origin in envy. More on this topic later.

Enough Facebook for one day. I have done my daily bit in combating the Left and its destructive nonsense. Now it's your turn.

Do your bit. Speak out. Show some civil courage.

maverickphilosopher.typepad.com

 

Cesare Pavese, "Passion for Solitude"

Passion for Solitude BY CESARE PAVESE TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY…

There is a Place for Polemic: A Characteristic Facebook Salvo

The trouble with people like 'Beto' the 'white Hispanic' blockhead, and Miss Occasional Cortex, is not just that they oppose the sound ideas that Dr. Hanson elucidates below, but that they could not even explain these ideas as a preliminary to a reasoned critique of them.

And another thing. There is a lot of leftist palaver these days about 'democratic norms' and their breaking by Trump & Co. But there is nothing 'democratic' about Deep State machinations aimed at removing from office a duly and DEMOCRATICALLY elected president.

And a lot of what these operatives call 'norms' are just their entrenched insidious practices. A practice does not get to become a norm just in virtue of its being normalized by elitist deep state careerists. What has become 'normal' may or may be normative. But one cannot expect this distinction to penetrate the shallow pates of the Democrat wannabes and their childish supporters. . . .

patriotpost.us

 

Proposed Voting Changes Are About Power, Not Principles

Progressive candidates and new Democratic representatives have offered…

About Whataboutism

What's with all the contemporary noise about 'whataboutism'?

Example 1. A lefty complains, "Trump is a liar!"  A conservative responds, "What about Hillary and Bill and Obama? They are not liars?"

Example 2. A pro-lifer argues that killing the prenatal is immoral and meets with the response, "What about all of the  'pro-lifers' who bomb abortion clinics, terrorize clinic staff, and block women’s legal access into such clinics?”

On one way of looking at it, 'whataboutism' is just the ad hominem tu quoque fallacy.  It's old wine in a new, but very ugly, bottle.  If the question is whether Trump is a liar, then it is irrelevant to bring in Hillary and Bill and Obama, despite their being egregious and proven liars.  Similarly in the abortion case. The violence of a few pro-lifers is simply irrelevant to the question of the moral permissibility of abortion. Or suppose my doctor, who has cancer, diagnoses  cancer in me. It would be absurd for me to protest the diagnosis on the ground that the sawbones has it too. What about you, doc? 

So can anything good be said about 'whataboutism'?

Let's think a bit deeper about example 1. If a lefty points out Trump's undeniable flaws in an effort to show that he is unfit for office, then it is relevant to bring up Hillary's also undeniable flaws.  For if her considerable  flaws do not count against her fitness for high office, why should Trump's?

Understood in this way, 'whataboutism' is not the fallacy of tu quoque, but a legitimate charge of double standard.  Trump is being held to a higher standard than Hillary.  

If the question is simply about Trump's character, then Hillary's is irrelevant. But if the two are competing for the same office, and Trump's defects are cited as disqualifying, then it is relevant to bring up Hillary's. Not to do so would be to employ a double standard.

One conclusion, I think, is that 'whataboutism' is a waste basket term that ought to be dumped. We  already have 'tu quoque fallacy' and 'double standard.'

Besides, it is a barbarism. 

My Opinion of Lindsey Graham Up a Notch!

Here is something I wrote about Senator Graham on 31 March 2016:

To understand liberals you must understand that theirs is a mind-set according to which a  conservative is a bigot, one who reflexively and irrationally hates anyone different than he is.  This is why conservatives who insist on securing the borders are routinely labelled 'xenophobes' by liberals and by some stupid 'conservatives' as well, an example being that  foolish RINO Lindsey Graham who applied the epithet to Donald Trump when the latter quite reasonably proposed a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the U.S. 

And here is what I wrote on 30 June 2016:

If you refuse to vote for Donald Trump because he is in several ways a loathsome individual, then I pronounce you a fool in point of the political.  You don't understand that politics is a practical struggle, not a gentlemanly conversation.  It is not about perfection or ideological purity or choosing the Good over the Bad.  It's about better or worse in the ugly concrete circumstances in which we presently find ourselves.

The argument of George Will and others of the 'bow-tie brigade' is patently lame, as lame as can be.  They will do what they can to stop Trump the vulgarian know-nothing.   In so doing they support Hillary.  When this is pointed out, the response is that  after four years of Hillary, we will elect a 'true' conservative to the White House.

This ignores the fact that after four years of Hillary it may be too late.  Four more years of illegal immigration from the south; four more years of largely unvetted Muslim immigration, including Syrian refugees; four more years of erosion of First and Second Amendment rights; four years in which Hillary can make 2-5 Supreme Court appointments; four more years of attacks on civil society, the buffer space between the individual and the state apparatus;  four more years of sanctuary cities and the flouting of the rule of law; four more years of assaults on the likes of the Little Sisters of the Poor and others who stand in the way of the pro-abortion agenda; and more.

Here is another question for George and Bill Kristol and the rest of the bow-tie boys: who will be your candidate? David French? Lindsey Graham?  Jeb!?

But Senator Graham has found his cojones!  His performance yesterday in defense of Judge Kavanaugh was magnificent. He is coming to learn that politics in the age of post-consensus politics is not a gentlemanly debate conducted under an umbrella of shared principles according to the Marquess of Queensberry rules, but a bare-knuckled slug fest against vicious and destructive swine who are out to subvert the Constitution, upend the rule of law and violate every norm of decency and common sense. 

No quarter to them!

No Entity Without Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Advantage of Being a Liberal

David Horowitz versus Jonah Goldberg

Here:

The posture of these NeverTrumpers is transparently self-serving. It preserves their intellectual credentials as “conservatives,” and simultaneously takes them out of the line of fire from an increasingly vicious Left whose goal is to destroy Trump and his presidency, and—incidentally—conservative America. Sitting on the fence affords them new career opportunities—appearances on CNN and MSNBC and columns in the New York Times. All that’s required is that they avoid taking sides in the political war that is engulfing the country. All this reminds me of a memorable Trotsky sneer about liberals, whom he accused of being reluctant to step into the stream of political conflict because they were afraid to get their moral principles wet.

Right. The principles of the Never-Trumpers are for discussion but not for implementation.  The members of the bow-tie brigade love to yap and scribble, and they do it at a very high level, as witness Goldberg's Suicide of the West, which I recommend to you for its insights; but they wilt at the prospect of bringing their principles to bear upon political reality and "getting them wet."

Up until now I had considered Goldberg to be the least offensive of the Never-Trumpers, but having read Horowitz's piece, Goldberg has dropped a notch in my estimation.

Trump Delivers

We conservatives who voted for Trump in November 2016 have been vindicated in spades. His accomplishments are manifold and multiplying.  A list is in order. I'll essay one later on. For now I draw your attention to the indelible conservative stamp President Trump is placing on the judiciary which includes but is not restricted to the Supreme Court.

What do you say now, Never Trumpers?  Man up and admit you were wrong.  It is sickening to watch George Will, a man I once respected for his erudition and insight, dissolve into a mewling, puling crybaby as if someone stole his bow tie and the propeller on his beanie.

From October 2016:

The Pussy Cat Bows of the Yap-and-Scribble Bow Tie Milquetoasts

Pussy Bow is elliptical for 'Pussy Cat Bow,' the latter a well-established term in the world of women's fashion.  Melania Trump sported one at the second debate. Was she out to implant some sly suggestion?  I have no idea.  But it occurred to me this morning that bow tie boys such as George Will also sport pussy cat bows.  (As you know, pussy cats are both male and female.)  And given the currency of 'pussy' in the politics of the day, it seems entirely appropriate to refer to the signature sartorial affectation of effete yap-and-scribble do-nothing quislings like Will as a pussy bow.

George Will is a good example of how Trump Derangement Syndrome can lead to cognitive meltdown.

I used to respect Will. No more.

Pussy Bow is elliptical for 'Pussy Cat Bow,' the latter a well-established term in the world of women's fashion.  Melania Trump sported one at the second debate. Was she out to implant some sly suggestion?  I have no idea.  But it occurred to me this morning that bow tie boys such as George Will also sport pussy cat bows.  (As you know, pussy cats are both male and female.)  And given the currency of 'pussy' in the politics of the day, it seems entirely appropriate to refer to the signature sartorial affectation of effete yap-and-scribble do-nothing quislings like Will as a pussy bow.

George Will is a good example of how Trump Derangement Syndrome can lead to cognitive meltdown.

I used to respect Will. No more.

And You are Still a Democrat?

This is addressed to those of you old enough to remember the Kennedy administration who are still Democrats. What the hell is wrong with you? Are you attached to a mere label when that to which the label was attached has evaporated entirely?  Are you bent on proving that there is no fool like an old fool? Get with it! You're living in the past!

Kurt Schlichter Lays into Never Trumpers

Cum ira et studio.

A take-off on a line from Tacitus, sine ira et studio, "without anger and partiality."  There is a place for righteous anger as there is for partiality and polemic. Schlichter's rant ends thusly:

You’ve talked and talked and talked about principles, but as James Comey and Robert Mueller and your gal Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit undermined every principle this country was founded on, all you did was clutch pearls about how Trump is icky. This country is in real danger of breaking apart, of actual conflict, but all you can think of is recovering your cheesy little seat on the Beltway bench.

No one’s fooled. And no one cares. Which ought to scare the hell out of you. Because when the liberals figure out that you have zero credibility with us real conservatives, you’ll stop being their useful idiot. You’ll just be a plain old idiot.

Still and all, I retain a soft spot in my heart for Never Trumper Mona Charen.

On Verbal Aggression

Robert Paul Wolff:

Verbal aggression, speaking generally, is a good thing, especially as an alternative to physical aggression.  The general rule about verbal aggression – satire, snark, ridicule, obscenity – is:  punch up, not down. 

A rule is one thing, its application another. How apply the Stoned Philosopher's rule? Suppose I ridicule Nancy Pelosi.  Am I punching up or down?  Arguably down inasmuch as she is an obviously stupid woman who is also vile. She is my intellectual and moral inferior. So I am punching down.

I will be told that I am punching up inasmuch as she has wealth and power far in excess of mine, and that therefore my verbal aggression is justified.

Whatever you say. The main thing is to keep up the verbal punching against our domestic enemies.

Related articles

The Left Eats Its Own: Andrew Sullivan

The Left's Weaponization of Institutions and Language

Sullen Obstructionist Crapweasel Crybabies

Also known as: Democrats. I left out: destructive, gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing, religion-hating, Constitution-disrespecting, language-hijacking, terrorist-coddling, dictator-appeasing, race-baiting, distinction-denying, reason-averse, law-nullifying, criminal-shielding, baby-aborting, tribal, totalitarian, . . . socialist . . . and so on ad nauseam.  So sad! And you are still a Democrat?

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Dick Durbin: Race-Baiting Hypocrite

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Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

Shut Down

This one goes out to Chucky Schumer and Dicky Durbin. We of the Coalition of the Sane are taking no small satisfaction in the fact that the Schumer Shut Down yielded you and your gang precisely nothing. 

Use and Mention

You should never use 'progressives' without sneer quotes because 'progressives' are destructive leftists who confuse change with progress.

The offensive term is mentioned in the first independent clause, and then used in the second, albeit in an altered sense.  When I write that 'progressives' are destructive, mendacious, devoid of common sense, and so on, I am talking about a certain bunch of malcontents; I am not talking about a word.

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Harry Binswanger on Why Language Matters

A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous New Criterion Attack

By a defense of Benatar, I do not mean a defense of his deeply pessimistic and anti-natalist views, views to which I do not subscribe. I mean a defense of the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely uncomfortable and are sure to bring obloquy upon the philosopher who proposes them.

The hit piece is entitled The 'Wisdom' of Silenus. It bears no author's name and looks to be something like an editorial. The view of Silenus is easily summarized:

Best of all for humans is never to have been born; second best is to die soon.

We should first note that while Benatar subscribes to the first independent clause, he does not embrace the second. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering.  Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (The Human Predicament, Oxford UP, 2017, 96)

Benatar outdoes Silenus in pessimism. We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way, Epicurus notwithstanding. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born. So being born is a misfortune twice over: because life is bad and because being dead is bad.

My first point, then, is that the NC author wrongly assimilates Benatar to Silenus. But why should that bother someone who thinks it acceptable to criticize a book he has not read? I have no problem with someone who dismisses a book unread. My problem is with someone who publishes an article attacking a book he hasn't read.

. . . apart from professional pessimists like Nietzsche’s mentor Arthur Schopenhauer, most people are rightly repelled by this so-called wisdom of Silenus. They understand that life is an inestimable gift, the denial of which is part folly, part obscenity. We said “most people.” There are exceptions. Suicide bombers, disturbed teenagers, and of course certain grandstanding academics. Take Professor David Benatar, head of the department of philosophy at the University of Cape Town. In 2006, Oxford University Press . . . published Professor Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. [. . .] “The central idea of this book,” we read on the first page of its introduction, “is that coming into existence is always a serious harm.” 

Understandably repelled, but "rightly repelled"?  How does the author know that? How does he know that "life is an inestimable gift"?  If life is a gift,then it has to have a donor, and who might that be, God?  I'm a theist myself, but surely the existence of God is not self-evident to one whose critical faculties are in good working order. If life is a gift of an all-good God, why is life so horrible for so many in so many ways? Of course there is goodness and beauty in the world as well. 

I should think that an intellectually honest person would admit that it is just not clear whether life is an "inestimable gift" or "a business that doesn't cover its costs." (Schopenhauer)  Such a person would admit that it is an open question and if he were inquisitive he would want to examine the arguments on either side. But not our NC author who is content to psychologize and ridicule and dogmatize in a manner depressingly ideological but most unphilosophical.

One of the comments on this book at Amazon.com complains that people have been rejecting the book without reading it or arguing against Professor Benatar’s position. Doubtless there is plenty to argue with, not to say ridicule, in Better Never to Have Been. One might start by meditating on what words like “harm” and “better” might mean in the world according to Benatar. It is sobering to contemplate what logical and existential armageddon had to have occurred in order for something like this book to have been written. Still, we believe people are right to take that high road and reject the book without engaging its argument. To quote Nietzsche again, you do not refute a disease: you might cure it, quarantine it, or in some cases ignore it altogether. You don’t argue with it. Reason is profitably employed only among the reasonable. (Emphasis added.)

The irony here is that the NC author is using Nietzsche of all people to clobber Benatar.  Assuming one thinks it acceptable to engage in quarantine and prohibition, is there any Western philosopher more deserving of quarantine and inclusion on the index librorum prohibitorum? Has our author ever read Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ? If you do not refute a disease, you also do not invoke the product of a diseased mind to dismiss as diseased the work of some other thinker.

As for rationality, Benatar is a paragon of rationality compared to Nietzsche who rants and raves and forwards incoherent views. For example, his perspectivism about truth collapses into an elimination of truth.  

Dr. Johnson had the right idea when he employed the pedal expedient against Bishop Berkeley’s doctrine of universal hallucination. Something similar should be employed in the case of Professor Benatar’s Lemmings First doctrine of human fatuousness.

This is the worst kind of pseudo-philosophical journalistic cleverness and name-dropping. It shows a thorough lack of understanding of Berkeley's idealism. Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects.  He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind.  If you know your Berkeley you know that what I just wrote is true and that the good bishop cannot be refuted by kicking a stone.

The gross facts, the Moorean facts, are not in dispute and philosophers are not in the business of denying them. I would have no trouble showing that even with respect to the characteristic theses of Zeno of Elea, F. H. Bradley, and J. E. M. McTaggart.

I do not deny that there are claims that are beneath refutation.  It is not always wrong to dismiss a statement as false or even absurd without proof.  Some claims are refutable by "the pedal expedient." Suppose you maintain that there are no pains, that no one ever feels pain.  Without saying anything, I kick you in the shins with steel-tipped boots, or perhaps I kick you higher up.  I will have brought home to you the plain falsehood of your claim.  Or suppose sophomore Sam  says that there is no truth.  I would be fully within my epistemic rights to respond, 'Is that so?' and then walk away.

But Berkeley is not denying the self-evident. Neither is Benatar. It is not self-evident that human life is an "inestimable gift."  That's not a datum but a theory. Maybe it's true. But maybe it isn't. Inquiry is therefore not only appropriate but necessary for those who seek rational justification for what they believe.

When James Burnham published The Suicide of the West in 1964, what he chiefly feared was the West’s lack of resolve to stand up to encroaching Communism. Quite right, too. Burnham was well endowed with what Henry James called the “imagination of disaster.” But we think that even Burnham might have been nonplussed by a Western intellectual who went beyond political capitulation to total existential surrender and whose proclamation of that gospel found a home at one of our greatest university presses. Even as we were absorbing Professor Benatar’s repackaging of Silenus, we stumbled upon an article revealing that sun-drenched, life-loving Italy had become “the least happy” country in Europe. “It’s a country,” said Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, “that has lost a little of its will for the future.” It’s also a country that has eagerly adopted the philosophy of Professor Benatar and Ms. Vernelli: Italy’s birth rate is an astonishing 1.23, among the lowest in Europe. This is “anti-natalism” with a vengeance.

This is disgusting tabloid stuff. First of all, Benatar is not repackaging Silenus. He is saying something different from Silenus, as we have already seen, and his books are chock-full of challenging arguments and distinctions. There is a lot to be learned from his discussions. I don't find his arguments compelling, but then no arguments in philosophy for substantive theses are compelling. 

Second, our journalist subordinates the search for truth to ideology.  I don't doubt that the West is under demographic threat.  Anti-natalist doctrines, if taken seriously by enough people, will tend to weaken us overagainst the Muslims and others that aim to displace us. But the philosopher seeks the truth, whatever it is, whether it promotes our flourishing or not.

Finally, if one is going to urge the ignoring of  Benatar because of the possible consequences of his views, then one should do the same with others including Herr Nietzsche. His views were input to the destructive ideology of National Socialism. (See Nietzsche and National Socialism) And then there is Karl Marx . . . . 

See also: Mindless Hostility to David Benatar

Related articles

Christian Anti-Natalism?

Anti-Natalism and the Search for Truth

More on Christian Anti-Natalism

David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

Maverick Philosopher: Anti-Natalism and Demographics

Seven Signs of Tyranny

Very interesting on several levels. I'll leave it to you to decide whether Trump is a tyrant. But here are a couple questions you might want to think about. By implying that Trump is a tyrant, is Robert Reich inciting violence?  Is he contributing to a civil 'conversation that will 'bring us together'? 

Which Side Are You On?

It is an appropriate question to ask in politics, though not in philosophy. Politics is warfare. If you call yourself conservative and don't support Trump, then you are helping the enemy. Which side are you on?

In philosophy we strive for objectivity. We take our time; we consider all points of view. We show respect for our interlocutors. We are civil. But one cannot be objective in a fight for one's life and way of life especially if one's way of life includes free speech, open inquiry, and resistance to the Left's totalitarian politicization and ideologization of everything, including pure mathematics! (More on this later.)  One has to secure, with blood and iron if need be, the space of objective inquiry against the ideologues who, at the present time, are chiefly leftists and Islamists, and who wittingly or unwittingly, work together. 

You don't like the vulgar Trump? Tough shit. He's all we've got. Face reality and its limitations. Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. The milque-toast McCains haven't done jack and won't do jack, except talk and obstruct. David Horowitz:

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)

Trump alone, an outsider who doesn't need a job, has the civil courage and is in a position to deliver the needed punches. That's why we like him. That's why we overlook his flaws. He punches back. And for other reasons given here. 

The Left's Biggest Challenge at the Moment . . .

. . . is to figure out a way to politicize Hurricane Harvey and blame Trump for it.  Either him or the deplorable racist bigots who support him. I'm sure the race-baiting, totalitarian bastards will come up with something.

Maybe they can take a leaf from that great black leader Louis Farrakhan on Katrina: 

In comments in 2005, Farrakhan stated that there was a 25-foot (7.6 m) hole under one of the key levees that failed in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. He implied that the levee's destruction was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the population of the largely black sections within the city. Farrakhan later said that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told him of the crater during a meeting in Dallas, Texas.^[24] Farrakhan further claimed that the fact the levee broke the day after Hurricane Katrina is proof that the destruction of the levee was not a natural occurrence.