I feel it to be my duty to do my bit, day by day, to counteract the tsunami of liberal-left Unsinn from the crapweasels of PC by linking to outstanding writers and thinkers. There is no way I can write with the authority of a Victor Davis Hanson or a Thomas Sowell or a Charles Krauthammer on history or economics or politics. But I can help spread the word.
Month: July 2014
The Summer of ’69
A lot happened that fabulous and far-off summer of '69, now 45 years past. I won't bore you with any autobiographical tidbits, and of course some of you remember the moon landing; but that was also the summer when Ted Kennedy's car killed Mary Jo Kopechne.
His car killed more people than any of my guns.
I now hand off to Malcolm Pollack.
A Joke from the Summer of ’65
How much power would it take to destroy Los Angeles?
Five or six Watts.
Thinking About Frodo
Let me attack yesterday's puzzle from a different angle. The puzzle in one sentence: we think about things that do not exist; but how is this possible given that they do not exist?
Here is the problem set forth as an aporetic hexad:
1. When I think about Frodo, as I am doing right now, I am thinking about, precisely, Frodo: not about some semantic or epistemic intermediary or surrogate or representative. I am thinking about a concrete, albeit nonexistent, item. I am not thinking about an idea in my mind, or a mental image, or any mental content; nor am I thinking about an abstract entity of any kind such as a property; nor am I thinking of a word or a phrase or anything linguistic.
2. Thinking about (thinking of) is a relation the relata of which are a subject who thinks and an object thought of. Thinking is triadic: ego-cogito-cogitatum.
3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, then all its relata exist/are.
4. There are no different modes of existence/being. This is the ontological counterpart of the semantic thesis of the univocity of 'exists' and 'is' and cognates.
5. To exist is to exist extramentally and extralinguistically, where the minds in question are finite.
6. Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist.
The limbs of the hexad are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. To solve the problem we must reject one of the limbs. But which one? (6) is a datum, and (5) is an unproblematic definition. So the the candidates for rejection are (1)-(4). I'll take these in reverse order.
Deny (4): There are two modes of being, esse reale and esse intentionale. When we say, with truth, that Frodo does not exist, we mean that he lacks esse reale. But we can still think about him in a manner to satisfy (1)-(3) since he has merely intentional being.
Deny (3): Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution. There are items that have no being at all, and there are genuine relations that connect existents such as minds to beingless items in the realm of Aussersein.
Deny (2): Thinking-of is not relational, whether or not the obtaining of a relation requires that all its relata exist. This can be developed in different ways. Adverbial theories, Brentano's theory, Butchvarov's theory.
Deny (1): One way to deny (1) is via abstract artifactualism. A number of philosophers, including van Inwagen, have been putting forth some version of this view. The idea is that purely fictional items such as Frodo are created by the authors of works of fiction in which they figure. They are a peculiar species of abstract object since they come into being, unlike 'standard' abstract objects. They exist, but they are abstract. Meinong, by contrast, held that they are concrete but do not exist or have any being at all. Here is a paper that defends artifactualism against some objections by Sainsbury.
Now, gentlemen, pick your poison! Which limb will you deny? I claim, though this is but a promissory note, that no theory works and that the problem, though genuine, is insoluble.
Islam as a Gang Religion
William Kilpatrick, The Gender Confusion Challenge to Army Recruitment. Excerpt:
As usual, the mainstream media is all wrong about Islam. In FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield points out that “looting was the core of Muhammad’s conquests.” And it came with Allah’s seal of approval. Numerous passages in the Koran and in the biography of Muhammad attest to the legitimacy of booty as the proper reward of fighting. Islam has no trouble with looting, says Greenfield, because it is “innately a gang religion”:
The gang … finds meaning in the ethos of the fight and in the comradeship of fellow gang members. That is why jihad is so central to Islam … Jihad is the gang culture of Islam. Its bonding rituals are central to Islam, whose original elements derive mainly from the raids of Mohammed and his companions…
Young men don’t join gangs just for the booty, but also for the sense of brotherhood the gang confers, and, perhaps primarily, for proof of masculinity. Psychologists and sociologists have known for a long time that gangs are particularly appealing to fatherless boys because boys who lack the guidance of fathers are most likely to feel insecure about their masculine identity, and thus most likely to seek confirmation of it in the ultra-masculine activities of gangs. Social scientists were hardly the first to discover this basic fact of male psychology. From the earliest times, almost all societies developed special rites of initiation for males to assist them in the passage from boyhood to manhood, and to channel them away from anti-social activities.
When boys grow up in communities without the guidance of fathers and elders and without established rites of initiation and confirmation, they tend to create their own initiation groups and rituals of passage. This is why modern urban areas with high concentrations of fatherless boys are the places where gang formation is highest.
The epidemic of fatherless boys is a worldwide phenomenon and it spells more recruits for the Islamic jihad. The reason the jihad doesn’t have a recruitment problem is that it appeals to basic masculine psychology. It promises action, male bonding, legitimate looting, a cause to fight for, subservient females in this world, and dozens more in the next. It’s the reason Muslims have been extremely successful in recruiting prisoners to Islam both in Europe and America. As I noted in Christianity, Islam, and Atheism:
In the United States, roughly 80 percent of inmates who find faith during their incarceration choose Islam. Many of these men are in prison in the first place because they were attracted to the masculine world of gangs. Now they’re being offered the chance to join the biggest, most powerful “gang” in the world. We’re seeing the beginning of a trend in the West: fatherless boys joining gangs, then ending up in prison, then coming out of prison as converts to Islam and the jihad. (p. 169)
There seems to be no shortage of young men willing to join up with the warrior culture of Islamic jihad. How about our own warrior culture—the U.S. military? The military still produces warriors, but the military culture is changing in ways that may make it less attractive to potential future warriors. Traditionally, the military has served, among other things, as an initiation into manhood. Past Marine recruiting campaigns, for example, were built around themes such as “The Marines Make Men” or “A Few Good Men.”
London Ed on Reference to What is Not
Two weeks in Greece passed both quickly and slowly. No access to internet or phone, much walking (on a lonely hillside I found a deserted monastery built on the ruins of a 6th century pagan temple) and much thinking. In particular, thinking about the 'Meinongian' thesis that there are objects that do not exist, and that 'there are Fs' can be understood in a 'wide' or unrestricted sense, so that nonexistent entities are to be included [in the ] domain of quantification and discourse, but also in a 'narrow' sense, including only existing objects.
You implictly defend this view often, but explicitly here: "the crux of the matter is whether there are different ways of existing, or different modes of existence. I say there are …". Here is a brief critique of this view. Consider:
(1) Tom is thinking of Frodo
(2) There is no such thing as Frodo
I think we both agree that both of these propositions* are true. If so, what are we to make of the following argument?
BV: Yes. We can call them data sentences. They record Moorean facts.
(3) Proposition (1) is of the form 'aRb', where a = 'Tom', R = 'is thinking of' and b = 'Frodo'
BV: Permit me a quibble. You don't want to say that a = 'Tom,' you want to say that 'a' is a placeholder for 'Tom.' Likewise for the other terms. It seems to me that you are making two very minor mistakes. One is use-mention confusion; the other is confusing a placeholder with an abbreviation. Sorry to be such a pedant!
I would add that if we distinguish between grammatical and logical form, then proposition (1) is of the grammatical form, aRb. It is at least conceivable that the deep logical form of (1) be something else. Brentano, no slouch of a philosopher, would read (1) as nonrelational, as having the form of 'Tom is a Frodo-thinker.' An adverbialist would take (1) as having the form of 'Tom is thinking Frodo-ly.'
(4) The truth of a proposition of the form 'aRb' always implies the truth of 'for some x, x = b and aRx', and hence the truth of 'for some x, x = b.'
BV: Agreed if you insert 'logical' right before 'form' in (4).
(5) [Interpreting (4)] If Tom is thinking of Frodo then there is such a thing as Frodo.
(6) [from (5) and (1), modus ponens] There is such a thing as Frodo.
(7) [(6) and (2)] Contradiction.
BV: For this reductio ad absurdum to be formally valid, you need an auxiliary premise to the effect that 'For some x, x = b' asserts the existence of b. In other words, you must read the particular quantifier 'For some x, ___ x ___' as an existential quantifier, where an existential quantifier expresses existence, where existence is real, i.e., mind-independent, existence. It is at least a question whether existence can be reduced to someness!
We might attempt to resolve the contradiction as follows. We should read (6) as asserting existence in some wide or unrestricted quantification sense, as follows:
(6A) There is such a thing[w] as Frodo
where 'thing[w]' ranges over all kinds of things, existent and non-existent. Likewise, we should read (2) as asserting existence in some narrow or restricted quantification sense, as follows:
(2A) There is no such thing[n] as Frodo
where 'thing[n]' ranges only over real or existing things. Where there is ambiguity, there is no real contradiction. To assert that Frodo is a thing in the wide sense does not contradict the assertion that he is not a thing in the narrow sense.
BV: I have been toying with a solution something like this, except that it is not strictly Meinongian. For Meinong, items like Frodo have no being whatsoever. That is his famous doctrine of Aussersein. I have been toying with the idea that they have being all right, but merely intentional being, esse intentionale as opposed to esse reale, where these are two different modes of being/existence. Lukas Novak, who shares with me the idea that thinking is genuinely relational, denies that it is impossible to refer to what has no being. See Lukas Novak on Reference to What is Not. It looks like I am fighting a war on two fronts, the London front and the Prague front.
My objection is as follows.
BV: Your objection, I take it, is to a solution along the lines I sketched.
Consider:
(8) Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo, but he is wrong
The conjunct 'but he is wrong' is a negation, and in order to be a negation, what it negates must have the same sense as what is asserted (inside the belief context). Having the same sense includes the terms having the same range, and so the range of the term 'thing' as it occurs in the assertion must be identical to the range of the same term as it occurs (although elided) in the negation. I.e. (8) can be expanded into
(8A) Tom thinks that there is such a thing[x] as Frodo, but it is not the case that there is such a thing[x] as Frodo
where 'x' indicates sameness of range. I.e. if the range in the assertion is narrow, it is so in the negation, and likewise if it is wide. Thus the range of the term 'thing' is irrelevant.
BV: Now you've lost me completely. There is clearly a difference between (1) — Tom is thinking of Frodo — and 'Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo.' I don't understand why you shifted to the latter sentence. To think about x is not to think that there is such a thing as x, nor is it to think that there is not such a thing as x. It is just to think about x.
At this point in the dialectic I don't know what you are up to. From previous discussions, your aim was to pin a certain exportation fallacy on me, the fallacy of moving from
Tom is thinking of Frodo
to
There exists an x such that x = Frodo & Tom is thinking of x.
That is clearly a non sequitur; I recognize it as such, and I don't commit it. If Tom is thinking of Frodo, then Tom is thinking of something; but it doesn't follow that this thing exists. On Meinong's theory, Tom is thinking of a beingless item. On my theory, he is thinking of an item that has esse intentionale but not esse reale. On Meinong's theory, intentionality is a relation, but the object relatum has no being at all. On my theory, is a relation, but the object relatum has merely intentional being.
Yet the form of 'Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo' is also 'aRb', where a is 'Tom', b is 'Frodo', and R is 'thinks that there is such a thing as'. If premiss (4) above were true, then from (8) we could derive 'there is such a thing such that Tom thinks that there is such a thing as it', which would mean Tom was right, rather than wrong.
My solution to the problem, as I have argued before, is to reject premiss (4). 'Tom is thinking of Frodo' has the grammatical form 'aRb', but that is not its logical form. Clearly its logical form includes an internal quantifier, i.e. a quantifier that is included inside the belief operator, but cannot be legitimately exported outside.
BV: Now I think I see what you are up to. You take
(1) Tom is thinking of Frodo
to have the logical form of
(9) Tom is thinking that Frodo exists.
And then your point is that (9) does not entail
(10) Frodo exists.
I agree that the inferential move from (9) to (10) is invalid. But I think it is a mistake that (1) can be replaced by (9). Suppose I am thinking of something. It might be London's Trafalgar Square or Boston's Scollay Square. The former exists (last time I checked) but the latter no longer exists. Clearly I can have either thought without the additional thought that the square in question exists or does not exist. To think about something is not eo ipso to think that the thing in question exists — or to think that it does not exist.
Perhaps I have misunderstood you.
___________________
*Proposition: (def) a sentence capable of truth or falsity, and so not a question, a command or a prayer.
The Militant Nihilism of Radical Islam
I don't believe I have ever read a column by Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club that is more penetrating, thought-provoking, or chilling than his Seven Gambit. Excerpts:
Just as soon as Israel accepted an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire Hamas fired 47 rockets killing one Israeli citizen. Anyone who has followed the conflict could have predicted this with certainty; the point of a ceasefire — for a terrorist organization — is to break it for exactly the same reason it purposely attacks women and children.
Dr. Anna Geifman tried to explain that the reason why innocents are selected as terror targets is because “children are the last consecrated absolute”. That is just why they must be killed in the cruelest way possible. For “militant nihilism strives to ruin first and foremost what their contemporaries hold sacred”.
Nihilism isn’t the absence of a belief. It is something subtly different: it is the belief in nothing. The most powerful weapon of terrorism is therefore the unyielding No. “No I will not give up. No I will not tell the truth. No I will not play fair. No I will not spare children. No I will not stop even if you surrender to me; I will not cease even if you give me everything you have, up to and including your children’s lives. Nothing short of destroying me absolutely can make me stop. And therefore I will defeat you even if you kill me. Because I will make you pay the price in guilt for annihilating me.”
It’s an extremely powerful weapon. The Absolute No is a devastating attack on the self-image and esteem of civilization. Hamas will demonstrate the No, the Nothing. It will show that deep down inside Israelis — and Americans — are animals like them.
[. . .]
The power of Hamas lies in that they will never stop hating. No ceasefire, concession, negotiation or entreaty will move them. That is their inhuman strength. The Jews can even exterminate them, but only at the cost of destroying all the ideals they hold dear. If the last Hamas activist could speak he would say this:
“Shoot! I am the last. Carry out your ethnic cleansing, just as the Nazis tried with you. You will never be able to look yourself in the mirror again. The price of victory is to win on our terms. Nothing will remain of your precious Jewish self-esteem, of the illusion that you are a civilization dedicated to morality. What will you do after you kill me? Go to your synagogue and a hymn of praise to your God?
“At that moment your faith will desert you. For you claim your God does not desire blood, that yours is a God of love and I say therefore He is false. The only real Gods are those of Hate. A God that does not live by blood does not exist as my God who lives by blood exists; and when you pull the trigger you will be worshipping at my altar! I have won at last. Come to prayer. Come to Islam.”
[. . .]
Wars through history have exacted an irreparable spiritual price from its [their] combatants.
[. . .]
It’s not an original thought. William Tecumseh Sherman knew before Collins that War is Hell; that the only excuse for it was the belief that you could in the subsequent peace, chain up the devils. He wrote in his letters, “you cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it … If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.”
Nor has its character changed much. Curtis LeMay, during what we remember as the Good War, shared his formula for defeating the enemy. “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”
Human beings are remarkably good at calling up the devil in their fellow human beings. They start out Christian enough, but give them time. In the first Christmas of the Great War, when fighting was but a few months old, there enough fellow-feeling among the combatants remained to spontaneously create what is now remembered as the Christmas Truce.
Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the point that individuals would walk across to talk to their opposite numbers bearing gifts. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, many soldiers from both sides—as well as, to a lesser degree, from French units—independently ventured into “no man’s land”, where they mingled, exchanging food and souvenirs. As well as joint burial ceremonies, several meetings ended in carol-singing. Troops from both sides were also friendly enough to play games of football with one another.
By the next year they were modifying their bayonets so it would hurt more when you stabbed the enemy. When we look at Hamas we are looking at some[thing] very old and ancient. Does the devil win in Seven? For that matter does he win on earth?
Say no if you can. For Hamas is determined to prove that you too are like them. Just like them.
Response to an Objection to My Last ‘Hobby Lobby’ Post
Dennis Monokroussos writes,
Your post on why the left “went ballistic” over the Hobby Lobby case was well-done as usual, and I for one was grateful for your emphasis that the so-called contraceptives in question were really abortifacients, and that the latter is not a proper adjective for the former. I do have a couple of questions/comments though.
First, about the left and religion. While I don’t like the politics or the theology of people like Jim Wallis of Sojourners or the President’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, it certainly seems that they are really religious and their politics flow from their faiths. I’m inclined to say that they have a mistaken anthropology and overvalue one understanding of justice at the expense of other legitimate senses, but wouldn’t say that they’re not really religious or that their true religion is leftism. (Well, maybe if I knew more about Wright’s theology I would say that about him. But I don’t believe that all lefties who claim to be Christians are just faking it and make a god out of the state and/or left-wing politics.)
Second, the statement that “they don't have the right to use the coercive power of the state to force others to pay for them when the contraceptives in question violate the religious beliefs of those who are forced to pay for them” seems to be overdrawn, at least if it’s generalized. If a Jehovah’s Witness owns a business, does he have the right to refuse to pay for an employee’s insurance when it pays for a blood transfusion? What about a pacifist being forced to pay taxes to support a war effort (especially one that doesn’t involve direct national self-defense)? There are all sorts of things we’re forced to pay for even though they violate our moral and religious beliefs, and while we can sometimes successfully fight those challenges (when, e.g., it poses an “undue burden”) there are other times when we must knuckle under unless we wish to engage in civil disobedience.
Maybe I will get to the first objection later.
Here is a very blunt response to the second. If you are opposed on moral grounds to blood transfusions, then you hold a position that is not morally or intellectually respectable. Therefore, IF the government has the right to force employers to provide health insurance that covers blood transfusions for employees, THEN it has the right to violate the beliefs of a Jehovah's Witness when it comes to blood transfusions. And the same goes for pacifism. If pacifism is the view that it is always and everywhere wrong to kill or otherwise harm human beings, then I say you hold a view that is not morally or intellectually respectable. I could argue this out at great length, but not now; I told you I was going to be blunt.
Note, however, that the blood transfusion case as described by Monokroussos is importantly different from the pacifism case. The first case arises only if something like the PPACA — ObamaCare — is in effect . I say the bill should never have been enacted. Government has no right to force private enterprises to provide any health insurance at all to their employees, and no right to force workers to buy health insurance, and no right to specify what will and will not be covered in any health insurance plan that employers provide for their employees.
The pacifism case is much more difficult because it arises not from a dubious law but from the coercive nature of government. I believe that government is practically necessary and that government that governs a wide territory wherein live very diverse types of people must be coercive to do its job. Moreover, I assume, though I cannot prove, that coercive government is morally justified and has the moral right to force people to do some things whether or not they want to do them and whether or not they morally approve of doing them. Paying taxes is an example. Suppose you have a pacifist who withholds that portion of his taxes that goes to the support of what is perhaps euphemistically called 'defense.' Then I say the government is morally justified in taking action against the pacifist.
But if the government has the right to force the pacifist to violate his sincerely held moral principles, why is it not right for the government to force the pro-lifer to violate her sincerely held principles? The short and blunt answer is that pacifism is intellectually indefensible while the pro-life position is eminently intellectually defensible. But the pro-choice pacifists won't agree!
Clearly, there are two extremes we must avoid:
E1. If the government may force a citizen to violate (act contrary to) one of his beliefs, then it it may force a citizen to violate any of his beliefs.
E2. The government may not force a citizen to violate any of his beliefs.
The problem, which may well be insoluble, is to find a principled way to navigate between these extremes. But what common principles do we share at this late date in the decline of the West?
Perhaps we can agree on this: the government may legitimately force you to violate your belief if your belief is that infidels are to be put to the sword, but it may not legitimately force you to violate your belief if your belief is that infanticide and involuntary euthanasia are wrong. (Suppose the government demands that all severely retarded children be killed.) But even here there will be dissenting voices. Believe it or not, there are those who argue from the supposed moral acceptability of abortion to the moral acceptability of infanticide. May the Lord have mercy on us.
So what's the solution? The solution is limited government, federalism, and an immigration policy that does not allow people into the country with wildly differing values and moral codes. For example, the Hobby Lobby case would not have come up at all if government kept out of the health care business.
The bigger the government, the more to fight over. But we don't seem to have the will to shrink the government to its legitimate constitutionally-based functions. So expect things to get worse.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jim Fixx Remembered
It was 30 years ago tomorrow, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.
The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.
See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan. Now for some 'running' tunes.
Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running
Jackson Browne, Running on Empty
Eagles, The Long Run
Beatles, Run for Your Life
Del Shannon, Runaway. Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway." Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".
Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
Johnny Preston, Running Bear
Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue
Roy Orbison, Running Scared
Crystals, They Do Run Run
Addendum (7/20)
I should have mentioned it last night. Today, 20 July, is not only the 30th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 49th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Wikipedia:
The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind … The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "[66][67]
Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful … He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else …' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".[69]
Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio. It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that? I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice. I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records. The fanaticism faded with the '60s. But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.
‘Religion of Peace’ Update
Convert, pay tax, or die, Islamic state warns Christians.
And in other news, Philadelphia mosque leaders try to cut off man's hand.
In the face of these and a dozen other serious problems what does our president do? He pulls a Nero using a pool cue for a fiddle.
The Truth About Gaza
To deliberately wage war so that your own people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian state of the world’s treatment of Israel (see: the U.N.’s grotesque Human Rights Council), fueled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance, and reflexive sympathy for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense.
In a world of such Kafkaesque ethical inversions, Hamas’ depravity begins to make sense. This is a world in which the Munich massacre is a movie and the murder of Klinghoffer is an opera — both deeply sympathetic to the killers. This is a world in which the U.N. ignores humanity’s worst war criminals while incessantly condemning Israel, a state warred upon for 66 years which nonetheless goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming the very innocents its enemies use as shields.
It’s to the Israelis’ credit that amid all this madness they haven’t lost their moral scruples. Or their nerve. Those outside the region have the minimum obligation, therefore, to expose the madness and speak the truth. Rarely has it been so blindingly clear.
Peter van Inwagen’s Trouble with Tropes
Concerning tropes, Peter van Inwagen says, "I don't understand what people can be talking about when they talk about those alleged items." (Existence: Essays in Ontology, Cambridge UP, 2014, p. 211.) He continues on the same page:
Consider two tennis balls that are perfect duplicates of each other. Among their other features, each is 6.7 centimeters in diameter, and the color of each is a certain rather distressing greenish yellow called "optical yellow." Apparently, some people understand what it means to say that each of the balls has its own color — albeit the color of one is a perfect duplicate of the color of the other. I wonder whether anyone would understand me if I said that each ball had its own diameter — albeit the diameter of one was a perfect duplicate of the diameter of the other. I doubt it. But one statement makes about as much sense to me as the other — for just as the diameter of one of the balls is the diameter of the other (6.7 centimeters), the color of one of the balls is the color of the other (optical yellow).
Although van Inwagen couches the argument in terms of what does and does not make sense to him, the argument is of little interest if he is offering a merely autobiographical comment about the limits of his ability to understand. And it does seem that he intends more when he says that he doubts whether anyone would understand the claim that each ball has its own diameter. So I'll take the argument to be an argument for the objective meaninglessness of trope talk, not just the PvI-meaninglessness of such talk:
1. It is meaningful to state that each ball has its own color if and only if it is meaningful to state that each ball has its own diameter.
2. It is not meaningful to state that each ball has its own diameter.
Therefore
3. It is not meaningful to state that each ball has its own color.
Therefore
4. Talk of tropes is meaningless.
The argument is valid, and (1) is true. But I don't see why we should accept (2). So I say the argument is unsound.
I am not defending the truth of trope theory, only its meaningfulness. I am maintaining that trope theory is a meaningful ontological proposal and that van Inwagen is wrong to think otherwise.
It is given that the two tennis balls have the same diameter. But all that means is that the diameter of ball A and the diameter of ball B have the same measurement, 6.7 cm. This fact is consistent with there being two numerically distinct particular diameters, the diameter of A and the diameter of B.
What's more, the diameters have to be numerically distinct. If I didn't know that the two balls were of the same diameter, I could measure them to find out. Now what would I be measuring? Not each ball, but each ball's diameter. And indeed each ball's own diameter, not some common diameter. I would measure the diameter of A, and then the diameter of B. If each turns out to be 6.7 cm in length, then we could say that they have the 'same diameter' where this phrase means that A's diameter has the same length as B's diameter. But again, this is consistent with the diameters' being numerically distinct.
There are two diameters of the same length just as there are two colored expanses of the same color: two yellownesses of the same shade of yellow. So I suggest we run van Inwagen's argument in reverse. Just as it is meaningful to maintain that the yellowness of A is numerically distinct from the yellowness of B, it is meaningful to maintain that the diameter of A is numerically distinct from the diameter of B. Looking at the two balls we see two yellownesses, one here, the other there. Similarly, measuring the balls' diameter, we measure two diameters, one here, the other there.
Again, this does not show that trope theory is true, but only that it makes sense. It makes as much sense as van Inwagen's proposal according to which optical yellow is an abstract property exemplified by the two balls.
Friday Smoke Blogging: Dead Smokers’ Society
The inaugural meeting, back in January, Scottsdale Community College, to protest the rising tide of tobacco-wackery. I just stumbled across this shot, a 'selfie' or perhaps an 'us-y' taken by Mike Valle of SCC.
Our motto: Carpe fumam!
Dog Racism!
Here:
But these days, it seems, no one wants to be a dog racist—and this is where things start to get really weird. “The opposition to pit bulls might not be racist,” Junod writes in his Esquire piece. “It does, however, employ racial thinking.” Jeez, Louise. I suppose, then, it is time that I confess: I am a pug supremacist. Go ahead and judge me, America. Say what you will, but the worst thing a pug can do is fart you to death.
Liberalism: Coercive and Illiberal
I've been pounding on this drum for years. I am happy to see that people are coming around.
Liberalism as an Instrument of Coercion
Rather than being what it began as, a “narrowly political strategy for living peacefully in a world of inexorably clashing comprehensive views of reality and the human good,” liberalism has for many become that comprehensive view of reality and the human good. Your neighbor’s ideas are no longer different. They are heretical. Liberalism could become the problem that it was intended to solve.
Right. That is why I call for a separation of leftism and state.