October 2013 – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

Obama as Bullshitter

While listening the other day to Barack Obama shuck and jive about fiscal responsiblity, shamelessly posturing as if he and not his Republican opponents is the fiscally responsible one, when he is in truth the apotheosis or, if you prefer, the Platonic Form of fiscal irresponsibility, I realized just how uncommonly good our POMO Prez is at bullshitting. He is indeed a consummate bullshitter. But what is it to bullshit, exactly? When is a statement bullshit?

Now what does this have to do with Obama? As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth. But truth and consistency are closely related notions. Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true. Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically. He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now. Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:

. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful. Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons. Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency — these are ethical attributes, properties of persons. Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president. When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it. That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness. But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed. It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'. There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white. Everything's a 'narrative' — good POMO word, that — and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it. Hanson has Obama's number:

But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?

[. . .]

The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.

In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.

Anderson on Nagel

Interest in Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos continues unabated. James N. Anderson weighs in here. I thank James for his linkage to my series of Nagel posts.

Nine Impediments to Religious Belief

Why is religious belief so hard to accept? Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter and lie in the path of the would-be believer. Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question, a normative question. The following taxonomy is merely descriptive. And not in order of stopping power. And perhaps incomplete. This is a blog. This is only a blog.

1. The obtrusiveness and constancy and coherence of the deliverances of the senses, outer and inner. The "unseen order" (William James), if such there be, is no match for the 'seen order.' The massive assault upon the sense organs has never been greater than at the present time given the high technology of distraction: radio, TV, portable telephony, the Internet . . . and Twitter, the ultimate weapon of mass distraction. Here is some advice on how to avoid God from C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

If Lewis could only see us now.

2. The fact that there are many competing systems of religious belief and practice. They overlap, but they also contradict. The extant contradictory systems cannot all be true, though they could all be false. The fact that one's own system is contradicted by others doesn't make it false, but it does raise reasonable doubts as to whether it is true. For a thinking person, this is a stumbling block to the naive and unthinking acceptance of the religion in which one has been brought up.

3. The specificity of religious belief systems and their excessively detailed dogmatic contents. One is put off by the presumptuousness of those who claim to know what they cannot, or are not likely, to know. For example, overconfident assurances as to the natures of heaven, hell, and purgatory together with asseverations as to who went where. Stalin in hell? How do you know? How do you even know that there is a place of everlasting punishment as opposed to such other options as simple annihilation of unrepentant miscreants?

The presumptuousness of those who fancy that they understand the economics of salvation to such a degree that they can condifently assert that so many Hail Mary's will remove so many years in purgatory. For many, such presumptuousness is an abomination, though not as bad as the sale of indulgences.

4. The fact that the religions of the world, over millenia, haven't done much to improve us individually or collectively. Even if one sets aside the intemperate fulminations of the New Atheists, that benighted crew uniquely blind to the good religion has done, there is the fact that religious belief and practice, even if protracted and sincere, do little toward the moral improvement of people. To some this is an impediment to acceptance of a religion.

Related point: the corruption of the churches.

Again, my task here is merely descriptive. I am not claiming that one ought to be dissuaded from religion by its failure to improve people much or to maintain itself in institutional form without corruption.

5. The putative conflict between science and religion. Competing magisteria each with a loud claim to be the proper guide to life. Thinking people are bothered by this.

6. The tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (religion).

7. The weight of concupiscence. We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so largely unable to control our drives. The thrust of desire makes most real the sensuous while occluding one's spiritual sight. Is it any surprise that the atheist Russell, even in old age, refused to be faithful to his wife? It is reasonable to conjecture that his lust and his pride — intellectuals tend to be very proud with outsized egos– blinded him to spirtual realities.

8. Suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not. In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.

9. The apparent moral and logical absurdities of some religious doctrines. "God said to Abraham, Kill me a son!" See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

Why Saggy Pants?

Peter proffered a theory over Sunday breakfast a while back. 'Gangsta' rappers and their imitators are aping the sartorial disarray of prison inductees. When you arrive at the slammer, the Man takes away your belt, so your pants fall down. So 'gangsta' rappers and their imitators are preparing themselves for prison life or else showing their solidarity with their incarcerated brothers.

Thinking that this might just be an urban legend, I headed over to Snopes, where I find Peter's theory confirmed. The droopy drawers dudes in prisons are not advertising their availability for sodomy, as some have surmised, but expose their butts because of over-sized beltless prison garb , the belts having been taken away to keep the miscreants from hanging themselves.

The question remains, however, why the rappers and their acolytes would choose criminals as their role models.

In all my years of blogging, this is only my third sartorial post. The other two are lodged, appropriately enough, in the category, Sartorial Matters. One mentions Montaigne, the other Adorno.

Nanny State Update: Of Footballs and Food Stamps

Wussification proceeds apace (emphasis added):

As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.

If you don't see this absurdity within the context of Right-Left struggle, you won't understand it. It is of a piece with the general wussification and infantilization of the populace promoted by leftists, the active promotion of food stamp dependency being a prime example.

As
you know, they are not called Food Stamps anymore. The program has been given the snappy
new label, at once both a euphemism and an acronym, SNAP: Supplemental
Nutritional Assistance Program. And it is actively promoted.

Liberals will call it part of the social
safety net. That metaphor suggests something to keep one from falling to one's
death. But it is also a net in the sense of a fishing net, a device that
entraps and deprives of liberty. But liberals ignore this aspect of their
favorite programs. For self-reliance and the nanny state don't go
together. Since the nanny state serves the interests of liberals,
self-reliance has to be diminished. Part of the motivation of the liberal is
to help the needy. But another part is the lust for power which, to be
retained, requires plenty of clients, plenty of dependents who can be relied
upon to vote Democrat, thereby voting goodies for themselves in the short term–
and the long-term fiscal and moral solvency of the nation be damned.

Am I
opposed to all social welfare programs? No. There are those who truly need help
and cannot be helped by private charities. But I am opposed to the current,
utterly irresponsible expansion of the welfare state, and for two reasons. One
is economic: the expansion is unsustainable. The other is moral: it diminishes
and degrades and infantilizes people. "The bigger the government, the smaller
the citizen." (D. Prager)

Food Stamps: the 'bread' in bread and circuses.

Progressivism as Religion: Peter Berkowitz on Ronald Dworkin

Here. Excerpt:

For Dworkin, the meaning of religion consists in “two central judgments about value” that he believes religious people — theists and some atheists — regard as objectively true. First, “each person has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one: that means living well, accepting ethical responsibilities to oneself as well as moral responsibilities to others, not just if we happen to think this important but because it is in itself important whether we think so or not.” Second, “what we call ‘nature’ — the universe as a whole and in all its parts — is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder.”

If this is what Dworkin maintains, then his characterization of religion leaves a lot to be desired, to put it mildly. This is obviously NOT what the meaning of religion consists in on any adequate understanding of religion. Religion cannot be reduced to axiology. True, the religious will accept that there are objective values and disvalues. But such acceptance, even if necessary for being religious, is not sufficient.

All or most of the following are beliefs essential to anything that can be legitimately called a religion:

1.
The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order."
(Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute
reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their
instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or
introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.
So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is accessible from our side via
mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be
ruled out in the form of revelation.

2.
The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good
lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order."
(Varieties, p. 53)

3.
The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes
our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the
moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral
corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

4.
The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by
our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.
The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral
purification/transformation.

6.
The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring
about this purification and adjustment.

7.
The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or
value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a
manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

In a word, Dworkin's characterization leaves out Transcendence; it leaves out what is absolutely central to religion, namely, the conviction that there is a transcendent dimension, an "unseen order," (see #1 supra) and that adjustment to this order is essential to human flourishing (see #2 supra).

What Dworkin has delivered is a miserable leftist substitute for religion. Being a leftist, he of course cannot value or perhaps even understand the genuine article; but he at least could have had the intellectual honesty not to try to redefine something whose definition is tolerably clear. Berkowitz has it right:

. . . Dworkin redefines religion to conform to his progressive sensibilities. What he presents as the offering of an olive branch to believers may seem to a person of faith, with justice, as a hostile takeover attempt. The steps by which Dworkin appropriates the religious label for his own left-liberal and atheistic outlook provide a case study in how the progressive mind, under the guise of conciliation, seeks to command the moral high ground exclusively and discredit that which differs from it.

"Hostile takeover" is right. Berkowitz also perceptively notes that

Dworkin also overlooks a formidable problem latent in his sanctification of the progressive perspective. If progressivism counts as a religion, then enacting the left-liberal policy agenda would seem to represent an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.

But of course progressivism is not a religion, but an anti-religious political ideology. Nevertheless, one can and must ask: if it is wrong for the State to impose religion on its citizens, why isn't it also wrong for the State to impose leftist ideology on its citizens as it now doing here in the USA?

I take a stab at this question in Separation of Leftism and State.

Stephen “God is not One” Prothero to Speak at Arizona State University

Details here. What follows is an excerpt from a 2010 post:

Religions: Problems, Solutions, Techniques

Simplifying a four-part
schema employed by Stephen Prothero in his God Is Not One (Harper,
2010, p. 14), I propose, in agreement with Prothero, that each religion can be
usefully seen as addressing itself to a problem; offering a
solution to the problem, a solution that also constitutes the
religion's goal; and proposing a technique for solving the problem and
achieving the goal.

This post will consider five
religions and how the simplified Prothero schema applies to them.

For Christianity, the problem
is sin, the solution or goal is salvation, and the technique is some combination
of faith and good works. (14) For Buddhism, the problem is suffering, the
solution or goal is nirvana, and the technique for achieving nirvana is the
Noble Eightfold Path. (14) Prothero's main purpose in his book is to stress the
differences between religions. That is the point of the silly title, "God is
Not One." Obviously, God is one by definition; it is the conceptions of God
that are various. It is also a bad title because Prothero's topic is religion,
not theism. Buddhism, after all, is not a theistic religion. But let that
pass. I can't fault the man for wanting to attract buyers with a catchy title,
one reminiscent of Hitchens' God Is Not Great. The schema makes clear
the differences between these two great religions:

Are Buddhists trying to
achieve salvation? Of course not, since they do not even believe in sin. Are
Christians trying to achieve nirvana? No, since for them suffering isn't
something that must be overcome. (15)

If salvation is
salvation from sin, then of course Prothero is right. Sin is an offence against
God, and in a religion with no God there can be no sin. Nevertheless, I am a
bit uneasy with the starkness of Prothero's contrast. The Buddhist too aims at
a sort of salvation, salvation from all-pervasive suffering. To use 'salvation'
so narrowly that it applies only to the Christian's religious goal obscures the
commonality between the two great religions. I should think that some
soteriology or other is essential to every religion. A religion must show a
way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one
perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is deeply
and fundamentally unsatisfactory, whatever the exact nature of the
satisfactoriness.

Read it all.

I also quote Prothero in On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance wherein I land some hard blows on Sam Harris.

Is A Primary Substance Minus its Accidents a Primary Substance?

I return to a question I was discussing back in August with John the Commenter and more recently with Lukas Novak. The question concerns how to define 'primary substance.' I suggested the following: ". . . an individual or singular complete concrete entity together with its accidents. " But why include the accidents? I gave the following argument:

1. Every primary substance is ontologically basic, where ontologically basic entities are those that exist
per se or independently unlike secondary substances and accidents.

2. Every ontologically basic entity is complete.

Definition: x is complete =_df for every predicate F, either x is F or x is not F. (This is rough since some restrictions will have to be placed on the range of the predicate F. But it is good enough for a blog post.) Thus either Socrates is seated at t or he is not. If he is neither seated nor not seated at t, then he is an incomplete object at t. But if he is an incomplete object at t, then he cannot exist at t. Now every ontologically basic entity is possibly such that it exists. Therefore, every ontologically basic entity is complete. Every ontologically basic entity satisfies the predicate version of the Law of Excluded Middle. (I don't think the converse is true, but then I am not affirming the converse.)

Therefore

3. Every primary substance is complete. (from 1, 2)

4. No primary substance minus its accidents is complete.

5. No primary substance minus its accidents is a primary substance. (from 3, 4)

Lukas Novak responds:

. . . although I concede that necessarily, Socrates has this or that accident, I deny that it follows from it that Socrates considered in abstraction from these accidents is an incomplete object. When Socrates runs, the whole of Socrates is there. When Socrates does not run, again, the whole of Socrates is there. But for any x, y, if the whole of x is there even if y is not there then y is not required for the completeness of x. So Socrates considered precisely qua Socrates, without running or not-running, is complete, and a substance – – the fact that a necessary condition of his existence is that he is connected either with the accident of running or the accident of not-running notwithstanding.

I suspect that Novak has committed an ignoratio elenchi against me. I grant that when Socrates runs, the whole of Socrates is present, and that when he is not running, the whole of him is present. (For when he is not running, he is walking, or skipping, or jumping, or standing still, or crouching . . . .) And so I grant that it is not necessary for the completeness of Socrates that he be running, and that it is not necessary for the completeness of Socrates that he be not running. But — and here is my point — it is necessary for the completeness of Socrates that either he be running or not-running. If he is neither, then he is incomplete, hence not a primary substance. The same holds for all contingent accidents.

Therefore, a primary substance minus its accident is not a primary substance.

My argument above is valid. If Novak thinks it unsound, he must tell me which premise he rejects.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: A Couple of Suicide Songs

Tastes in music are pretty much generationally-rooted. Just to yank (tug?) Dale Tuggy's chain a bit, I said to him while we were rooming together in Prague, that the heavy metal stuff he likes is "music to pound out fenders by," a phrase that Edward Abbey (1927-1989) applied to all rock music. I claimed heavy metal has little by way of melody. Tuggy, who is 20 years younger than me, demurred and pointed me to some songs one of which is Metallica's Fade to Black. The song was released in '84 when Tuggy was 14, so maybe it had the sort of impact on him that Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone (1965) had on me when I was 15.

"Fade to Black" features a very nice acoustic guitar intro and does have a melody, but can it hold a candle melody- or lyric-wise to Tom Wait's suicide song, Shiver Me Timbers? You decide.

McAfee Says ObamaCare a Hacker’s Wet Dream

More proof, as if more proof is needed, that the Obama Administration is incompetent. There is some justice in this, however. A stupid electorate deserves a stupid government.

Ontic Versus Alterity Theism

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. Mikael Stenmark's Prague paper, "Competing Conceptions of God: The Personal God versus the God beyond Being" got me thinking about it again. What follows, however, is not intended as commentary on Stenmark's paper.

One way into the problem as I conceive it is via the following aporetic triad:

1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.

2. For any x, y, if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)

3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.

It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.

(1) or something like it must be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists. Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.

(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible!

(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but many find it plausible.

But since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected. (I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.) There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.

A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1). There is no God in any sense of the term. No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.' There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God.

B. The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).

C. The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).

But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).

One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza. Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists — God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans — ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.

This is what I used to think, back in the '80s. See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257. But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.

That is the other C-option. Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains. Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains. Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains. Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent, pace monism. This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas. Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. So God is Being (esse) but God also is. God is Being but also the prime 'case' — not instance! — of Being. But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties.

But this too has its difficulties. So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.

Roughly, the above triad is an aporia, an insolubilium. One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive. The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Unsayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able — and this is his office – to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.

Message from Malcolm on the Shutdown

Here's an outstanding short item from Thomas Sowell. Perfect clarity. Thought I'd pass it along in case you haven't seen it.

Best,
Malcolm

P.S. Hope your trails aren't Barackaded…

Not yet. Let him try. My affirmative traction Jeep will find a suitable trailhead despite the machinations of our very first presidential affirmative action hire.

Trial of the Century?

It was on this date in 1995 that the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial came down: not guilty! To refer to this proceeding as the trial of the century ought to offend anyone with a modicum of historical sense and a concern for the English language. It is on a par with Tom Brokaw's silly reference to the World War II generation of Americans as the "greatest generation." Here is an example of what I am opposing:

We always hear phrases like "Fight of the Century" and "Trial of the Century" … well, this really was the Trial of the Century. A Pro Football Hall of Fame running back might or might not have killed his wife and one of her male friends. All evidence pointed to him. No other suspects. No alibi. A disturbing history of domestic abuse. A motive. Blood splattered everywhere, including back at the suspect's house.

Nonsense! Irresponsible journalism of Brokavian proportions. If the Simpson double homicide trial was the Trial of the Century, then what were the following?

Sacco-Vanzetti (1921)
Leopold-Loeb (1924)
Scopes "Monkey" Trial (1925)
Nuremberg Trials (1945-49)
Alger Hiss (1949-50)
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1951)
Adolf Eichmann (1961)
Clinton Impeachment (1999)

Most of the above were far more significant than the Simpson trial. Who was Simpson? A guy who was uncommonly good at chasing a piece of pigskin around a field who one night gave vent to his murderous rage in a brutal double homicide. The only thing significant about that trial was that it exposed the tribalism among so many blacks, their incapacity to abstract from their racial identity and evaluate evidence rationally and objectively. This tribalism was again on clear display recently in the Trayvon Martin case. Except for a few black conservatives, black commentators on the trial displayed a depressing level of delusional thinking. Yes, you are delusional if you think there is a meaningful comparison between the Emmett Till case (1955) and the Martin-Zimmerman proceeding. Either that or you are contemptibly mendacious.

Whatever became of Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the Simpson trial? Her story here.

BEATific October Again

And
no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack' reading from "October in
Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the
wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback
edition. Bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was
travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode
of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked and
talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix. New Orleans proved to be
memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2. It was
there that Lonesome Traveler joined On the Road in my
rucksack. I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries. Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was.

Here is a long excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two
sections of the piece, pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

Minorities Can’t Be Expected to Have Photo ID, but Can be Expected to Navigate ObamaCare Sites?

Long-time reader Tony Hanson perceptively notes a contradiction in the Obama administration's attitude toward their poor minority clients:

As I read about the complexity and nightmares (or as Obama prefers, glitches) of the ACA [Affordable Care Act] marketplace roll out today, I am reminded of your posts on Voter ID. Apparently the condescension of Obama and the Dems is very selective. They think requiring poor minorities to have the wherewithal to accomplish the relatively simple task of securing an ID card is just too difficult a task for them and therefore discriminatory; at the same time the success of the new healthcare law requires them to navigate (using a computer and internet connection mostly) a rather complex system of web sites, information and rules.

And while the Feds will spend millions upon millions to provide them help, it apparently cannot provide a tiny fraction of this amount to help them get IDs (if in fact they really need this help) and thereby secure the integrity of the voting system and democracy itself.

'Selective condescension' is an apt phrase. Blacks and other minorities are thought to be too bereft of basic life skills to secure government-issued photo ID, which is free in many states, but are nonetheless expected to be computer-savvy enough to sign up for ObamaCare. But if this contradiction were pointed out to Obama or the liberals that support him, it wouldn't faze them in the least. For they care about logical consistency as little as they care about truth. For a leftist it's all about power and nothing else. They have no bourgeois scruples about truth or the rule of law. The end justifies the means.

The plain truth of the matter is that Dems oppose photo ID because they want to make polling places safe for voter fraud. This is a harsh allegation but one that is perfectly justified given the utter worthlessness of the 'arguments' brought forth against photo ID. But I have said enough about this depressing topic in ealier posts, some of which are listed below.

If one has demonstrated that one's opponent's arguments are worthless, it is legitimate to psychologize him. For motives abound where reasons are nonexistent.