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Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

My name is William F. Vallicella, I have the doctorate in philosophy (Boston College, 1978), and I have published a couple of books and 70 or so articles in the professional journals. A confirmed blogger in the grip of cacoethes scribendi, I’ve been online since May 2004 on various platforms.  This is MavPhil Gen IV.  I publish online here, at Substack, on Facebook, and at X.  I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric “Philosophy in Progress.” The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and provides a list of my professional publications. 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. 

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (Terentius) “I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me.” 

Motto: “Study everything, join nothing.” (Paul Brunton)

Comment Policy: This site is not a discussion board.  Comments must address directly what the author says or what the commenters say.  Other comments will not be allowed to appear. Comments should be pithy and to the point. In these hyperkinetic times, the regnant abbreviation is TL;DR.  If you are a cyberpunk needing to take a data dump, please relieve yourself elsewhere.

My politics?  From Democrat to Dissident

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.

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

 

Continue reading “Welcome to Maverick Philosopher“

A Pre-Print of THE HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT for Comments

Chad McIntosh, the editor of the new journal Triptych, invited me to submit an article to his online publication. He suggested a revision of an old Substack article of mine.  Here is the redacted version.  I solicit your comments on content and style.  The final section is incomplete.   My deadline for submission is 1 September. 

………….

THE HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

In The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, Andrew Klavan writes,

There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God’s existence. (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2016, p. 231)

I’ve often had a similar thought. In this article I will present an argument from the fact of great moral evil to the existence of God. I will conclude with a brief comparison of my argument to some others in the literature.

Project

The usual order of proceeding is from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. From Epicurus to David Hume to J. L. Mackie, this has been a staple in the history of philosophy. (See J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for an against the Existence of God, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) There is no need to rehearse the familiar logical and evidential arguments from evil to the nonexistence of God. They are well-known and have been carefully studied. There is no denying their force. Some of them are plausible even if none of them are strictly probative. But one can also plausibly argue from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in several different ways.

One way is to argue that there could be no objective difference between good and evil without God. That there is such an objective difference is a presupposition of the stock atheist arguments. They can’t get off the ground without it. Given this objective difference, how is it possible? Might “the moral law within me” (Kant) require a transcendent lawgiver? One could argue that the objective difference between good and evil either requires a divine ground or is best explained by the positing of a divine ground. This is not the way I will be arguing. I do, however, presuppose that there is an objective difference between good and evil.

Another way of arguing, an instance of which will be presented here, does not argue to the existence of God from the objective difference between good and evil, or from evil in general, or from natural evil in particular, or from moral evil in general, but from a special feature of some moral evils. The special feature I will focus on is the horrific depth and severity of some moral evils, a phenomenon that beggars naturalistic understanding. This type of argument is what Klavan is hinting at above.

My aim is not to give a rationally coercive or ineluctably conclusive argument for the existence of God from horrendous moral evils. So I do not maintain, with Klavan, that the depth of these evils “requires” or entails God’s existence. There is no valid deductive argument the premises of which are either absolutely certain or ‘morally certain’ (certain beyond a reasonable doubt) that can take us from the fact of horrendous moral evils committed by humans to the existence of God. The most we can hope for is an abductive argument to God as the best explanation of the fact of horrendous moral evils. Given that ‘refute’ is a verb of success, my aim here is not to refute atheist arguments from evil but merely to neutralize them by showing that the tables can be turned: the objective fact of moral evil can just as easily be marshaled in support of God. This is especially so if we focus on the worst instances of moral evil.

Further, I have no illusions about neutralizing atheist arguments from evil in the eyes of atheists. My old friend Quentin Smith once said to me, “If you were God, would you have created this world?” For him this question had the force of a refutation, articulating as it did one of his deepest convictions: the godlessness of the universe. Against convictions that run as deep as this, convictions ‘bred in the bone before born in the brain,’ argument comes too late. So my purpose in the following is merely to show theists that their position is rationally acceptable and thus rationally defensible. A secondary purpose is to show that those who are inclined to accept theism, but have not yet committed themselves, may embrace it while remaining within the precincts of reason. A tertiary purpose is to foster this inclination in those who are open-minded ‘fence-sitters.’

Definitions, distinctions, and assumptions

By “God’ I mean the God of the Christian Bible replete with the standard omni-attributes, the very ones exploited by Hume et al. for their atheistic purposes. More specific attributes such as divine simplicity and divine tri-unity are not relevant to what follows.

I provisionally assume the standard distinction between moral and natural evil. Moral evil is evil that has its source in a misuse of free will. Whose misuse? The only moral agents we are familiar with are ourselves, human beings. Human beings are physically embodied and reside in the natural world. But we ought not assume that all finite moral agents reside in the natural world. Between the natural and the supernatural lies the preternatural wherein presumably are located such finite spirits as angels, fallen angels (demons) and perhaps pre-embodied and disembodied human souls. Demons are demons because of their misuse of free will. If there are demons, then moral evil has one source in us and another in them. If demons are allowed into our ontology, then the distinction between moral and natural evil remains, but with the proviso that natural evil is, or can reasonably be viewed as, a species of moral evil, namely, the evil bought about by demons by their pernicious influence on us, on lower animals, and on inanimate nature. The Christian theist can then account for all evil as moral evil. Multifarious are the ways in which demons are supposed to bring about evil. Most common is temptation, an ‘ordinary’ diabolical influence. But there are also ‘extraordinary’ diabolical assaults which include possessions, oppressions, and vexations. The Roman Catholic exorcist, Fr. Carlos Martins distinguishes six types of demonic activity. The first type is ‘ordinary,’ the rest ‘extraordinary’: temptation, vexation, infestation, oppression, obsession, and possession. (See his The Exorcist Files, New York: Faith Words, 2024, pp. 43-60)

If there are no demons, and natural evil is not a species of moral evil, then this irreducibly natural evil, affecting as it does both humans and lower animals, is a very powerful reason to reject theism. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit this. Without the reduction of natural evil to a species of moral evil, nature “red in tooth and claw” is hard to square with theism. The notion that a world so apparently awful as ours could be the creation of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving deity, one who providentially cares about his creatures, strikes many as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable. To repeat what Quentin Smith once said to me, “If you were God, would you have created this world?” A world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, are biologically programmed to do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged. If you were the omni-competent and omni-benevolent architect of our world, would you design it to be a slaughterhouse? (See Quentin Smith, “An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws (Religious Studies, 1991), https://infidels.org/library/modern/quentin-smith-evil-laws/) If, on the other hand, natural evil is a species of moral evil, then this ‘abattoir objection’ to theism can be turned aside. Natural evil can be charged to the account of the demons.

But are there demons? Well, they are attested in the Bible, in the Pauline letters and elsewhere, and are essential to the Christian narrative. If you want empirical evidence of their existence, I refer you to Richard Gallagher, M. D., Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attack, and the Paranormal (Harper One, 2020). See also Fr. Carlos Martins, op. cit.

I assume that the difference between good and evil is objective, and not a matter of attitude or anything merely subjective. When I say that the horrific depth and intensity of some moral evils “beggars naturalistic understanding,” I mean that the magnitude of these evils is hard to understand if naturalism is true. By ‘naturalism,’ I mean metaphysical naturalism. David M. Armstrong’s ‘strict observance’ definition serves present purposes.

According to Armstrong, naturalism is the thesis that “all that exists is the space-time world . . . .” (D. M. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 1). The space-time world is the physical world. The thesis of naturalism, then, is that reality is exhausted by physical reality. Armstrong deploys a criterion of reality that is at once both physical and causal: an item is real if and only of it it is physical and causally active/passive. Other philosophers, such as Graham Oppy, favor a more latitudinarian definition that allows the ontological inventory to include causally inert abstract objects in addition to spatiotemporal concreta. Oppy’s position, however, is just as inhospitable to theism as Armstrong’s since both sorts of naturalist “suppose that causal reality just is natural reality” and that theists “suppose that in addition to natural reality there is a further nonnatural causal reality,” one that includes God, angels, and departed souls. (Graham Oppy, “Conflict Model,” Four Views on Christianity and Philosophy, Zondervan 2016, p. 31)

The holocaust argument

The argument is animated by the intuition that homo homini lupus does not capture the full extent of human depravity: man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man. The Latin saying is an insult to the wolves to boot, who are by nature predatory. Lacking free will, they cannot help eating animals alive. By contrast, a man who behaves savagely towards human beings does so by free choice. His savagery is not plausibly viewed as merely animalic, a matter of biological ‘programming,’ but is plausibly regarded as spiritual in origin, and in a two-fold way: as deriving internally from a will that is free, but also as deriving externally from demonic influence. Free will is a spiritual attribute: no wholly material system possesses it. And of course demons are pure spirits. Human savagery is therefore two-fold in origin.

Before proceeding it would be good to have before us an example of human savagery. Fidel Castro, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent, he had them tortured in unspeakable ways:

Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ”political rehabilitation” were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ”drawer cells,” specially constructed units that make South Vietnam’s infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters. Eventually, together with several others, Mr. Valladares plotted an escape from their prison on the Isle of Pines. But the boat that was to pick them up never arrived. He and his accomplices were brought back to their cells and given no medical attention, though Mr. Valladares had fractured three bones in his foot during the escape attempt.

The retribution was swift. Mr. Valladares writes: ”Guards returned us to the cells and stripped us again. They didn’t close the cell door, and that detail caught my attention. I was sitting on the floor; outside I heard the voices of several approaching soldiers. . . . They were going to settle accounts with us, collect what we owed them for having tried to escape. . . . They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. . . . Suddenly, everything was a whirl – my head spun around in terrible vertigo. They beat me as I lay on the floor. One of them pulled at my arm to turn me over and expose my back so he could beat me more easily. And the cables fell more directly on me. The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.”

That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly awoke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest. Illness and disease were a constant. Even at the end, when the authorities were approving his release, Mr. Valladares was held in solitary confinement in a barren room with fluorescent lights turned on 24 hours a day. By then he was partially paralyzed through malnutrition intensified by the lack of medical attention. (Ronald Radosh, “Surviving Castro’s Tortures,” The New York Times, June 8. 1986. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/08/books/surviving-castro-s-tortures.html?pagewanted=all)

Now no man is a demon, but a man can freely choose to play the demon in his behavior towards other animals both human and non-human. If he so chooses, the person is morally and not merely causally responsible for his morally horrific behavior. Moral responsibility presupposes freedom of the will. But although we are free, we are susceptible to the influence of any demons there might be. Of course, it does not follow from our choice to behave in a demon-like way that there are demons. The evidence for their existence is impressive, but hardly conclusive. For all we can claim to know, there may or may not be any demons. But if there are, we would be open to their malign influence and, though we would not be determined to act in accordance with their influence, we would be inclined to do so by our morally ambivalent (fallen) nature, such that some of us would succumb and freely follow their leading. Phase I of my overall abductive argument goes like this:

1) Although none of us are demons, some of us freely play the demon with respect to fellow humans by treating them savagely.

2) While it does not follow from (1) that there are demons, their malign influence on us would help explain what would otherwise be naturalistically inexplicable, namely, the horrendous depravity of the moral evils inflicted by some of us on others of us.

3) That this horrendous depravity is naturalistically inexplicable is supported by the following sub-arguments:

a) We are morally responsible for some of what we do and leave undone. 

b) Moral responsibility presupposes (and thus entails) free will. Therefore:

c) Torturers are morally responsible for the torment they inflict upon their victims.

d) If naturalism is true, however, then free will and moral responsibility are illusions.

e) It is not the case that free will and moral responsibility are illusions. Therefore:

f) Naturalism is not true.

In support of (e), I offer the following epistemic argument:

g) We are directly aware of our libertarianly-free agency, our freedom in the unconditional ‘could have done otherwise’ sense.
h) That we enjoy this direct awareness is better known than the proposition that all of our mental and physical processes are causally necessitated by events antecedent to our births. Therefore:
i. We are justified in believing that we are libertarianly-free even if we cannot explain how this is possible given the putative (macro) determinism of nature.

Have I proven (definitively established) that horrendous moral evils are naturalistically inexplicable? No. But this should come as no surprise because in philosophy and theology there are no proofs of any substantive theses. Since the meta-thesis just enunciated is substantive, and a thesis of philosophy, a branch of which is metaphilosophy, there is no proof of my metaphilosophical thesis either. I accept this consequence with equanimity. But it is eminently reasonable to believe the meta-thesis, and like it or not, reasoned belief is as good as it gets in philosophy and metaphilosophy. It is as good as it gets and it is good enough.

Now for Phase II of my overall abductive argument. The truth of (3) — horrendous moral evils are naturalistically inexplicable — is logically consistent with the nonexistence of God. How do we get from the falsity of naturalism and the truth of (3) to the existence of God? How do we get from evil demons to the all-good God? As follows.

4) Given the falsity of naturalism, the existence of demons cannot be ruled out.

5) And given that our horrific demon-like behavior would be explained by our free acquiescence in demonic suggestions, the actual existence of these demonic agents is abductively inferrable. Abductive inference is admittedly ‘shaky’ as is every non-deductive inference. Nor can we be certain that the inference terminates in the best explanation. But abductive inferences are not in general irrational, and neither is this one in particular.

6) But we still need to get from the preternatural to the supernatural. The following argument rationalizes this move, in the sense that it renders it rationally acceptable.

j. The demonic host is a hierarchical order at the apex of which is an Evil Principle (and Principal). The undeniable reality of evil has a unified metaphysical ground. Call it Satan.

k. It is not unreasonable, then, to posit an Evil Principle to explain the full range and depth and depravity of evil. One might now speculate that God and Satan are equal but opposite principles and Principals, eternally at war with each other. Manicheanism looks to be a possible explanation of the depth of moral evil. It has been classically maintained, however, that Good and Evil are not co-equal principles. Such bifurcation would destroy the unity of Being which is the objective correlate of the mind’s drive toward explanatory unity.

l. So Good is primary, evil secondary and derivative. It is secondary and derivative in that it cannot exist without Good. One way to cash this out is by holding that evil is privatio boni, a lack, a privation, an absence of good. A stock example is ocular blindness. The evil of blindness is a lack of sight. Many evils can no doubt be assayed as defects, privations, insufficiencies, absences. But the privatio boni doctrine, while it accounts for the privative character of evil, does not explain its positive character. Surely there is more to evil than a mere lack of good. Glance back at the tortures inflicted by Castro’s henchmen on fellow Cubans. Was their suffering the absence of pleasure or the absence of a neutral hedonic state? Obviously not. And it was not merely horrific physical suffering that they endured, but the spiritual suffering of being the object of unremitting hatred and the concomitant sense of total abandonment by man and apparently also God, an abandonment akin to what Christ suffered on the cross: “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, harking back to Psalm 22:1)

If there is an Evil One as the source of horrendous evil, however, then the positivity of such evil can be charged to the Evil One’s account. The positivity of horrendous evil would then be grounded in the existence of the Evil One and the malevolence emanating from his misuse of his free will. Satan, after all, is not a mere absence of good, but a positive entity in his own right who, although good in his Being, is evil in his Willing. The Father of Lies is good insofar as he is: ens et bonum convertuntur. To be is to be good; hence every being (ens) is good insofar as it participates in esse (Being) Yet Satan is the ultimate source of evil in that his exercise of free will is malevolent.

m. If the existence of evil presupposes the existence of good, and evil exists in its prime instance as an Evil Person created by God, then good exists in its prime instance as the wholly good Person, God.

The holocaust argument and other similar arguments [incomplete]

There is more than one way to argue from evil to God. In a very useful article, “Theistic Arguments from Horrendous Evils,” Daryl Ooi distinguishes three types of argument, arguments from objectively horrifying evil, pragmatic arguments, and arguments from reasonable responses. (See Ooi, D., “Theistic Arguments from Horrendous Evils,” Philosophy Compass 2022 17(8), pp. 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12866 )

Alvin Plantinga has sketched arguments of the first type. (See Ooi, op. cit. for references.) My ‘demonological’ argument is also of this type. Marilyn McCord-Adams offers a pragmatic argument, the gist of which is as follows.

……………………

Rudolf Höss, not to be confused with Hitler’s Landsberg amanuensis, Rudolf Hess, was a torturer by day but a loving family man by night. [ENDNOTE: Rudolf Höss (1900–1947) was a German SS officer and the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex, serving from 1940 to 1943 and again in 1944. Höss was instrumental in industrializing mass murder, introducing Zyklon B as the primary method of execution in Auschwitz gas chambers. During the Nuremberg Trials, he provided detailed affidavits and testimony regarding the camp’s operations, admitting to personally supervising the extermination of approximately 1.1 million people. AI generated.]

Academentia at the University of Cambridge: The Case of Jason Arday

It is sad to see the mother country, to which we owe so much, collapse under the weight of its own inanition, toxic tolerance, suicidal empathy, and overall decadence. Douglas Murray on Jason Arday.

When news broke on Friday that the disgraced academic Jason Arday had been found dead at home in London, after being accused of plagiarizing much of his work and lying about all manner of biographical details in his recent memoir, there were those on the left who leapt to blame racism.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan immediately posted on X that “Jason Arday was the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn’t have faced.”

Some years back I asked an Englishman, a Londoner, how a Muslim could become mayor of his great city. “He was elected.” No doubt. But how could that happen?  How many Christians have high government positions in Muslim countries?

A Jungian Analysis of the Transgender Lunacy of Some Progressive Females

The following comment by Vito B. Caiati on an earlier post of mine deserves to be brought to the top of the queue.  Minor edits and bracketed content added; otherwise verbatim. The above title is mine. Vito would probably not use the polemical word ‘lunacy.’ Comments of mine are in 10-point below.

Consider for a moment the fact that the personae of so many progressive women are structured around solidarity with designated marginalized groups, such as biological men suffering from gender dysphoria who identify as females and demand the right to participate in women’s sports and share women’s private spaces.

In this case, persons with egos of some strength are able simultaneously to hold onto (1) the observable fact that human sexual dimorphism results in marked disparities in strength, speed, and endurance between the sexes and that (2) opposing discrimination against marginalized groups is a worthy public policy position. Thus, a healthy ego rejects any resolution of this tension by simply effacing the rights of women in sports or private spaces.

Both (1) and (2) make a strong claim on our acceptance, although the nature of the discrimination mentioned in (2) needs to be spelled out. And yet the two propositions are in tension: although the merits of each ought to be acknowledged, they cannot both be accepted.  How resolve the tension? A sane (non-lunatic) solution is by holding fast to what is empirically evident, namely, (1), and then reformulating (2) so as to make it logically compatible with (1).  That is what I would say, and I am sure Vito would agree. The question then arises: why don’t our opponents on this issue agree?  Read on.

For progressive women, however, once the status of marginalized groups is elevated inside their personae to a sanctified status, then any acknowledgement of sexual differences, however empirically evident, appears as a betrayal; such perceptions are thus repressed or relativized (“sex is a spectrum,” etc.). These repressed perceptions pile up in [what Carl Gustav Jung calls] “the shadow,” where they are intensified and distorted, and are projected onto critics, who are viciously attacked, their arguments denounced as “hate,” rather than countered rationally, as in the case of J.K. Rowling and so many other advocates of women’s rights. This all ends up in enantiodromia, and the abandonment of earlier, hard fought for, feminist goals. [‘Enantiodromia’ is Jung’s term for the tendency of any extreme to produce its opposite.]

In the above paragraph, Vito is doing two things. He is first of all giving a Jungian psychological explanation of why our opponents will not accept what to Vito and to me  is obviously the case, namely, the fact of sexual differences between men and women, differences that make it unfair to allow biological males to compete against biological females in sporting events.  One could ask, of course, whether the Jungian psychological explanation is the best explanation. Might there be a better one?  There is also the meta-question: Is it ever logically kosher to refute a proposition by psychologizing those who advance the proposition?

The second thing Vito is doing in the above paragraph is pointing out that the extreme transgenderist  position of feminists who traditionally demanded equal rights generates its opposite, namely, the violation of the rights of women and girls to privacy and fairness.

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst, There is None”)

Tucker Carlson’s Ten-Point Manifesto

From Axios. My comments are intercalated and signaled by ‘BV.’

[Tucker] Carlson said any successor to America’s faltering political system should begin with a shared understanding of what the country “should be,” which he distilled into 10 points.

Fair: The same rules should apply to presidents, federal agents and elites such as Jeffrey Epstein, whose impunity Carlson cast as emblematic of an “Epstein class” enriching itself through a corrupt system.

BV: Of course!

Sovereign: Carlson claimed Israel pushed the U.S. into the Iran war through “bribery or threat or both,” while describing foreign lobbying, corporate control of government and high-interest debt as forms of “slavery.”

BV: As for the claim about Israel, I don’t understand why Carlson makes it. What’s his evidence?  Of course, Israel would be the first nation to be nuked into oblivion should the Islamo-theocrats in control of Iran acquire nuclear weapons.  So Israel, among all the nations of the world, ought to be, and presumably is, the most concerned about the Iranian threat, and is of course pleased that the USA, under Trump’s leadership, is doing something about it.   But the Big Satan (USA) is also in the cross-hairs, as are the nations of Europe.  The IRGC is a threat to civilization tout court.  Tucker should praise Trump for his fearless leadership.

As for “corporate control of government,” Carlson may have a point that ought to concern conservatives. I understand that our government has a 10% stake in Intel Corp.  This deserves discussion and not Hannity-style dismissal.

Productive: America should rebuild farming, manufacturing and craftsmanship while rejecting an economy dominated by finance, real estate speculation, surveillance systems and weapons.

BV: The things mentioned in the initial clause are  taking place under Trump.  As for the second clause, it is impossible that our economy not be devoted in large part to surveillance systems and weaponry given the external and internal threats we face from our adversaries:  The Chi-Coms, NOKO, radical Islam, imperial Russia, and the commie takeover of the Dems by the DSA.

Beautiful: Carlson alleged that urban planners deliberately “uglified” American cities, and portrayed brutalist architecture, graffiti, public drug use and violent crime as deliberate attacks on the public.

BV:  Deliberately?  Attacks by whom?

Healthy: Carlson embraced RFK Jr.’s food agenda, called for universal sobriety and said widespread use of drugs such as Xanax, Adderall and SSRIs had left Americans “half-addled.”

BV: I agree completely.

Honest: Government officials should be punished for lying to citizens, and most classified records — including on the JFK assassination and 9/11 — should be opened.

BV: Yes!  And Trump is doing just that.  The transparency of the Trump administration is in stark contrast to the lack thereof in previous administrations. Example: UFOs/UAPs.  Tucker should thank Trump.

Optimistic: Carlson argued that having children is a biological imperative and the foundation of long-term thinking, while blaming aging and childless elites for policies that disregard future generations.

BV: OK, but if one cares about future generations, then a terror-state such as Iran under the IRGC cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons and the ICBMs to deliver them.

Wise: Schools should teach how the physical world actually works and what he called unchanging facts about human nature — including innate differences between men and women — rather than credentials, screens and technological fads.

BV: Bad writing, but I agree.

Decent: The U.S. should apologize and pay restitution for killing noncombatants, reverse Trump’s “Department of War” rebrand and stop funding allies that commit what Carlson called genocide, citing Israel.

BV: This is the unhinged Carlson 2.0.  (I suspect that his being cashiered by FOX played a major role in his unhinging.) What noncombatants?  The DOD rebrand is just honesty. War is not just defense: it is attack and defense.  By the way, ‘DOD’ was itself an obfuscatory rebrand; Trump restored the original name.  Finally, to refer to Israel as ‘genocidal’ is an Orwellian inversion of the truth.

United: Carlson called for halting immigration until the effects of AI become clearer, ending benefits for undocumented immigrants and making English the sole language of federal documents and ballots.

BV: I agree entirely re: the second and third points.  The first point obviously needs qualification.

In conclusion, this manifesto is deeply flawed, but does make some good points. I used to think highly of Tucker Carlson,  It is too bad he lost his way.

The European Free Speech Crisis

While reading this depressing article, it occurred to me that the U.K. and the Continent, in their assault on free speech, might be half-wittingly acquiescing in Islamification and entry into dhimmitude.  Why? Because of an excess of empathy unto cultural suicide?  Maybe civilizations, like individuals,  can get old and tired and just give up.

Academentia at Bates College

A DEI hire sees through the wokisme and quits the tenure track.  A must-read in The Atlantic:

In a consultant-led meeting I attended near the end of my time at the college, one month into Donald Trump’s second term, the small group of professors and senior administrators present was asked to share what it saw as Bates’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. One of my colleagues said that the college’s greatest strength was its commitment to DEI. Another said that the college’s greatest weakness was that it could be even more committed to DEI. Someone lamented that our ties to the Wabanaki Nations could have been stronger.

As snow turned into slush, I walked by a flyer pasted to a campus building announcing the college’s annual sex week. The technicolor poster proclaimed that Bates would be hosting a game of “dildo ring toss” and would provide “exploration tables” replete with sex toys. Once, I might have seen in that poster a symptom of everything wrong with the college—money wasted on weird bullshit, organized by bureaucrats whose jobs nobody could explain. Now I found it all oddly refreshing. What was Bates if not a place devoted to risk-free ideological masturbation? For a week, at least, we could be honest about it.

Months later, I joined The Atlantic as a full-time staff writer.

The Political Theology of the Sanctuary Movement

The existence of sanctuary jurisdictions, whether state or local, is one of the main bones of contention between Left and Right. This is a fight to  the political death of one side or the other. There can be no compromise with our political enemies.  To understand what the fight is about, we need to know  the history of the sanctuary movement.  The following verbatim from Sean Davis, The Hard Truth About the Sanctuary Movement:

The American sanctuary movement, by contrast, rewards criminality and endangers innocent citizens. Its history began in 1971 in Berkeley, California, at the height of the anti-Vietnam protests, when city officials passed a resolution declaring Berkeley a “City of Refuge” for draft dodgers. Eleven years later, Gus Schultz, a left-wing Berkeley pastor, expanded the idea by declaring his church a safe harbor for asylum seekers fleeing El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

In early 1985, the city of Berkeley passed the following resolution:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that no employee of the City of Berkeley violate the established sanctuaries by assisting in investigations, public or clandestine, by engaging in or assisting with arrests for alleged violation of immigration laws by the refugees in the sanctuaries or by those offering sanctuary, or by refusing established public services to the established sanctuaries.

City councilors further resolved that the “sanctuary originally offered by the churches be expanded to include the entire city and that BERKELEY become a CITY OF REFUGE[.]” San Francisco, across the bay from Berkeley, followed suit in 1989, and the sanctuary city concept quickly spread across the country to Tucson, Seattle, Duluth, and Ithaca.

The actions of those offering sanctuary at the time violated U.S. immigration law, because the asylum claims being made by Latin American refugees were in almost every case rejected during the Reagan administration. The reasoning was that if the migrants were, as they claimed, fleeing violence in their home countries, they could flee to the nearest safe country—whether Mexico to the north or Venezuela or Colombia to the south—rather than to the U.S. Because they were not seeking refuge in the nearest safe country, they were determined by the U.S. government to be economic migrants, seeking economic opportunities in our country, rather than war refugees seeking an escape from violence. As such, they did not qualify for asylum.

Fast forward to 2021, when the Biden administration threw federal immigration law out the window. In effect, under the guise of granting asylum, it federalized and supercharged the sanctuary city efforts that began in the 1980s, erasing the border and inviting anyone into the U.S. who wished to come.

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimated there were more than eight million encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden years, with some estimates north of ten million. Migrants arrived from all over Latin America, often with the aid of drug cartel coyotes who were either paid by the job or expected services to be rendered once their charges reached the U.S. Coached by lawyers from so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to make asylum claims, they were then released into the U.S. on their own recognizance and told to appear in court years later to have their asylum claims adjudicated. The Biden administration even arranged to have many of them flown—at the American taxpayer’s expense—to cities of their choice.

Thus what had started as a narrow effort to take care of a small number of needy refugees in a single city developed, after several decades, into a sprawling global industry involving national governments, NGOs, criminal syndicates, and hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars a year. Every institution involved had either a political or an economic incentive to ensure a never-ending flow of migrants into the U.S. Forget vetting. Forget filtering out criminals and drug traffickers. Forget ensuring that only those willing to assimilate into our culture should be admitted into our country. The illegal immigration-industrial complex had become a self-perpetuating machine.

Over the past year-and-a-half, the second Trump administration has reestablished secure borders—without which a country can hardly claim to be a country—and has attempted to begin deporting those who entered illegally during the previous four years. But its efforts have been met at every turn with opposition, often violent, even when it comes to deporting the most dangerous illegal immigrants. And much of this opposition is sanctioned by state and city officials enlisted in the sanctuary movement.

As of last year, the U.S. Department of Justice calculated that twelve states and the District of Columbia—nearly one-quarter of the country—had become sanctuaries for illegal immigration. In addition, many major cities outside of those states—including Albuquerque, Boston, New Orleans, Newark, and Philadelphia—had been designated as sanctuary cities. The Center for Immigration Studies counts the number of sanctuary cities or counties across the country at more than 200.

Of Fauci and the Fifth

Aaron Kheriaty, Icarus Descending

Whenever [Anthony] Fauci is in the news, Elon Musk takes the opportunity to post on X, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Based on the number of reposts, even by Elon’s standards, countless disaffected Americans—who lost years of education during school closures, who were injured by a shot they were forced to take or who (like me) lost their jobs for refusing to take it, who were prevented from sitting with loved ones dying in hospitals, or who suffered depression, drug relapse, or suicidality during prolonged lockdowns—agree that there should be legal consequences for Fauci’s record of deception and manipulation, now thoroughly documented for anyone who cares to look.

Iran War: Two Very Good Articles

Victor Davis Hanson, What the Situation on the Ground in Iran Actually Looks Like

Brian T. Kennedy, A Defense of the President’s Strategy in Iran

The Iranian regime’s strategy today is simple. Fight a war of attrition against the United States. Maintain strategic, military, and economic relationships with Communist China and Russia to keep the economy afloat and the arsenal of drones and missiles replenished. And wait for the day when President Trump is out of office, trusting that his successor will lack his resolve. The mullahs believe time is on their side. Every American president before President Trump taught them to believe it.

[. . .]

To avoid a forever war, we need to understand a truth that our political class resists: as long as the Islamic Republic stands, it is a permanent enemy of the United States.

What we face is not a forever war, but a permanent problem—the perpetual ambition of the mullahs to build nuclear weapons—with which we must deal. If regime change is not possible, however desirable it may be, then the next best option is a military strategy that continuously destroys Iran’s nuclear capabilities as they appear, for as long as they appear, until American missile defenses are fully operational.

This is not the endless nation-building of Iraq and Afghanistan. It requires no occupation, no democracy promotion, no American garrisons rebuilding Iranian society. It is the periodic and decisive application of American power in defense of the American homeland—nothing more, and nothing less.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 60 Years Ago: REVOLVER

Good commentary here:

The LP was released in August 1966, when “Wild Thing” by the Troggs topped the Billboard charts. It was a fascinating musical moment historically: “Revolver” arrived just as pop music was pivoting from straightforward rock toward psychedelia, experimentation, and studio-driven albums. The Beatles were not the only ones evolving, of course. The year 1966 saw a remarkable wave of experimentation that also produced “Pet Sounds,” “Blonde on Blonde,” “Freak Out!,” and other ambitious studio works, as popular music rapidly evolved from straightforward rock-and-roll into a vehicle for artistic exploration. A creative arms race, if you will. Still, “Revolver” — raw, edgy, avant-garde, kaleidoscopic, and at times unsettling — ushered in a sound that would go on to define the rest of the 1960s.

Epic Life Elements

Vlastimil Vohanka  tells me he met  online with Marin Zhelezov on June 13, 2026 and discussed the nature and examples of epic life.  VV solicits my comments. Consume cum grano salis. I have not read Zhelezov beyond what he is quoted as saying below.  Here are the elements of an epic life, as formulated by Zhelezov as reported by VV.   My comments are signaled by ‘BV.’

1. Travel — must have, adventures unfold with travel.

BV: True! To the young, in particular, I say: get out there and take the risks. “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” (Henry David Thoreau) See the world to appreciate the homeland. Go alone, travel light, like a man, not a suitcase, swot up as much of the local lingo as you can, and try to make it back home alive. Take pictures, keep a journal. If you make it back, you won’t regret your adventures. Then you can boast, “Been there, done that.” Forever after you will enjoy the having done what the old man, having had enough of this vain world, would no longer  want to do.

But be careful! Especially you women who too often are trusting to the point of being  pollyannish.  See The Young and the Restless: The Cautionary Deaths of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan.

2. Meaningful goal, not just entertainment.

BV: Of course. No ‘killing time.’ Make good use of your incarnation, your time in the human body. Serious games for entertainment, games that require concentration and deep study to play well: chess and Go, for example.

3. A sense of leveling up, catching progressively stronger pokemon —> boss battle.

BV:  The formulation here is too sloppy for it to be worth my time trying to make sense of it.

4. Flow state, act at the edge of your competence.

BV: There are two ideas here that ought to be separated.  You can perform at the edge of your competence without entering the flow state, but if you enter said state it will probably be at the edge of your competence.  Take it to the limit to see where your limits lie.  The trick is to go to the limit without falling into the abyss.

In the late ’70s, training for a marathon, I pushed as hard as I could. One day after a training run, I urinated blood. I had taken it to the limit. A one-time event. Never pissed blood again. I had the good sense to back off. But if you don’t push hard, you won’t know where your limits lie.

During that marathon training  I had gotten myself into the shape you have to be in to experience the flow state called the ‘runner’s high.’ I experienced  it a few times. It is rare, like a mystical experience, but it is not a mystical experience. It is a form of ‘mundane transcendence’ in which your vehicle is no longer  a Volkswagen bus but a supercharged Corvette.

As a a young man I drove many a time from Dayton, Ohio where I had a teaching job to Boston, Massachusetts where I had girlfriends, without stopping except for gas. 18-20 hours of driving. Thermos coffee and sandwiches for body fuel. The first ten hours were a warm-up.  I then entered the flow state, in touch with my inner Neal Cassady,  ready for some serious driving.  “Put me on a highway/Show me a sign/ Take it to the limit/One more time.” (Eagles, 1975)

Some years later I traded in the VW bus for  a 1988 Jeep Cherokee base model: five-speed manual tranny, 4.0 liter, six-cylinder engine, four-wheel drive, off-road shocks, oversized tires, and manual air conditioning. Bought it in Ohio, but kept it in Arizona despite the fact that I live in the infernal Valle del Sol — from which I don’t escape in the summer like some snowbird wimps I could mention.

Manual air  conditioning: if you want air, you use your God-given hands to roll  down the windows. In this part of the country manual AC is also know to the politically incorrect as ‘Mexican air conditioning.’ “Roll down the windows, Manuel!”

One blazingly hot August I drove straight through from Bishop, California up on U.S. 395 to Chandler, Arizona, 600 miles, alone. Stopping for gas in Blythe, on the California side of the Colorado river, I noted that the afternoon temperature was 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Bouncing along Interstate-10 I saw that the only people with their windows down were me and the Mexicans.

It’s no big deal, really, driving through 115 degree heat in the middle of the day in the middle of the desert with the windows down.  You take a bandanna and soak it in the ice water in your cooler and wrap it around your neck. When the dry blast of desert wind hits the wet bandanna some serious evaporation takes place, cooling your neck and with it the rest of your body. Feeling a little drowsy after four hundred miles of nonstop driving? Stoke up a cheap cigar, say that Swisher Sweet that’s been aging under the seat alongside those oily shop rags, and throw another audio tape into the deck. May I recommend Dave  Brubeck? Or how about Kerouac reading to the piano accompaniment of Steve Allen? Or perhaps that latter-day beat, Tom Waits.

With four on the road, one in the hand, a cigar in the mouth, some boiling hot McDonald’s drive-through java in the other hand, Brubeck on the box,  proudly enthroned at the helm of a solid chunk of Detroit iron, rolling down a wide-open American road, with a woman waiting at the end of the line, you’re feeling fine.

5. Winning = you must defeat someone, curing cancer is meaningful but it won’t feel epic.

BV:  I agree if the one you attempt to defeat is your own lower self. But why must one defeat someone other than oneself?  The above reads like a  ‘manospheric’ compensatory reaction to the feminization of boys, a reaction by boys who were prevented from exercising their innate masculine aggressiveness in the schoolyard or on the playing fields.

I recall reading about the schoolyard  ‘tug of war’ being replaced by a ‘tug of peace’ along with the dodge ball we played back in the day.  Sickening! I of course oppose such asinine feminization. But I also oppose the mindless reaction thereto: the abuse and denigration of women.

6. Element of collecting, like Diablo 2, collecting items, making you stronger, proof of past adventures.

BV: I am a collector of trophies, ribbons, photographs, religious and secular mementos, not to mention  books, books, and more books all as proof of past adventures, literary and otherwise, especially during my Wanderjarhren.  I don’t understand people who get rid of their books.  Many of my books are like treasured photographs. I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek. That book, like so many others with their inscribed accession date, marginalia,  tell-tale bookmarks, love letters, dedications, and what-not are treasured mementos.

It is not clear to me, however, how this vast pile-up of personal antiquities makes one stronger.

7. Esoteric knowledge put in practice, secrets.

BV: I need some examples.

8. Coadventurers, RPG party, guild, sense of belonging to an exclusive identity (wizard’s guild). Builds frenship [sic]

BV:  What’s the RPG party?  The Reactionary Philatelic Gastroenterologists? The Royal Patrons of Goombahs? The promiscuous use of unexplained abbreviations rankles my ass. And we can’t have that.

9. Winning a battle brings a maiden as a reward.

BV: Here the toxic masculinity of these argonauts of the ‘manosphere’ again  rears its ugly head.  How much of this is mere reaction, reflexive as opposed to reflective, to their feminization? And as I have stated many times, masculinity as such is not toxic, any more than femininity as such. But there are forms of masculinity that are appropriately described as ‘toxic,’ meaning poisonous and destructive to their agents and even more to their victims.  Anyone who can’t see that is a combination of stupid and morally obtuse.

Few are the women these days who fancy themselves ‘damsels in distress’ waiting for a heroic male in shining armor to come along and save them.  Few are the ‘maidens’ these days who see themselves as rewards or trophies.  They will not object to being mounted, in a context of love and commitment, but not on a wall.

10. Must have some form of risk.

BV: I agree. Life is for living. No living to the full without some risk-taking. The risks are all out there waiting to be taken, in matters of money, of love, of the spiritual quest.  In the latter, the serious seeker must face the risk of demonic assault.  The demons hate us and want to destroy us. There is Unseen Warfare; Lorenzo Scupoli calls it Combattimento Spirituale.    So the highest warrior is the spiritual warrior. Take no risks without prior calculation: look before you leap. On the other hand, he who hesitates is lost. Balance your maxims. Better to sit or better to run? “A man sits as many risks as he runs.”  (Henry David Thoreau)

Later addition, after the podcast:

11. To be epic, your goal must save (some part of) the world or transcend death in the spiritual realm.

BV: Agreed.

A Trendy Example of an Alienans Adjective: ‘Artificial’ in ‘Artificial Intelligence’

My examples scattered hitherto over many a post were stodgy such as ‘decoy’ in ‘decoy duck’ and faux in ‘faux marble.’  A decoy duck is not a duck.  Faux marble is not marble. An aktuell example is ‘artificial’ in ‘artificial intelligence.’  Artificial intelligence is not intelligence any more than artificial leather is leather.  Just as there are not two kinds of leather, artificial and real, there are not two kinds of intelligence, artificial and real.  Artificial leather simulates (real) leather;  artificial intelligence  simulates (real) intelligence.  Those are bare assertions.  I link to an argument of mine at the end of this post. This just over the transom from Tony Flood:

Philosophically trained, this Substacker asks the right questions re:  “AI without minds.” Doubting, as a good Lonerganian should, that AI is at all a species of intelligence, I’ve nevertheless been socially inhibited about using locutions like “so-called AI.” But no more. A baby brain is not an incipient computer, and computers neither are nor have minds. That insight might resonate with you as it does with me. She’s my “go-to” on this topic.

Yes, Tony, your Lonerganian point resonates with me although I put it in a different way above using ‘alienans adjective,’ a term  I picked up from Peter Geach, no slouch of a philosopher.  From whom did he get it? No idea.  Probably from some medieval dude.

I explore the topic further and give more examples in Fiction and Alienans Adjectives.

As for the substantive question whether AI systems are conscious, I argue for a negative answer in my Substack article Artificial Intelligence and the Unity of Consciousness.