September 2016 – Maverick Philosopher

On Denying the Cat, or Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined

Yesterday, Victor Reppert quoted the following passage from G. K. Chesterton:

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

What Chesterton is saying is that sin is a fact, an indisputable fact, whether or not there is any cure for it. Not only is sin a fact, original sin is a fact, an observable fact one can "see in the street." Chesterton also appears to be equating sin with positive moral evil.

Is the concept of moral evil the same as the concept of sin? If yes, then the factuality of moral evil entails the factuality of sin. But the concept of moral evil is not the same as the concept of sin. It is no doubt true — analytically true as we say in the trade — that sins are morally evil; but the converse is by no means self-evident. It is by no means self-evident that every moral evil is a sin. It is certainly not an analytic or conceptual truth. Let me explain.

There are sinful acts; If there are sinful acts, then God exists; ergo, God exists. This argument is valid in point of logical form, but is not probative because it begs the question in the first premise: anyone who classifies some acts as sinful in so doing presupposes the existence of God.

Scholars and Writers for Trump

How could any decent person vote for the obnoxious, self-absorbed, truth-indifferent jackass Donald Trump?

Here are reasons you ought to consider.

Word of the Day: Fainéant

n. irresponsible idler.

adj. idle and ineffective: indolent.

David French on Hillary on ‘Implicit Bias.’ Hillary as Cultural Marxist. Psychology of the NeverTrumper

Here (emphasis added):

Indeed, in the debate Monday night, Clinton framed her discussion of “implicit bias” as a malady we all suffer from, telling Lester Holt:

“I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other.”

Well, yes, too many people do jump to conclusions. So, what’s the solution, Hillary? When it comes to policing, since it can have literally fatal consequences, I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers. Wait. What? If we’re all biased, who’s training whom? Let’s be very clear: When it moves from abstract to concrete, all this talk about “implicit bias” gets very sinister, very quickly. It allows radicals to indict entire communities as bigoted, it relieves them of the obligation of actually proving their case, and it allows them to use virtually any negative event as a pretext for enforcing their ideological agenda.

What bothers me about David French is that, while he writes outstanding columns in support of the conservative cause, he is, last time I checked, a NeverTrumper.

Would it be fair to label him a yap-and-scribble milquetoast 'conservative'? He talks and talks, writes and writes, but refuses to support the one man who has any chance of impeding Hillary and the Left's destructive 'long march' (Mao) through the institutions of our society. That is so strange and so absurd that one may be justified in a bit of psychologizing. Perhaps the explanation of his behavior and that of others in his elite club is revealed in this column by F. H. Buckley:

I gave a talk to a conservative group not so long ago, when the NeverTrumper still lived in his fantasy wor[l]d. They believed that the voters and delegates would finally come to their senses and nominate the amiable Ted Cruz, or that somehow they’d jigger the Convention rules, or that the absurd Great White Hope, David French, would do the trick.

It was four months ago, and I gave my usual anti-Pollyanna talk of gloom and doom. When I finished people lined up to ask questions, and one of them was a senior executive at a prominent DC think tank. “It’s true we’re going to Hell in a hand-basket,” he said, “but this time we’ve got a lot of great think tanks on our side.” Right you are, I thought. Bad as it might be, you can say “I’ve got mine.”

I thought of that when I talked to a friend yesterday. He spoke of dinner parties ruined when NeverTrumpers start abusing Trump supporters. Then he told me of one dinner party at which two of the most prominent NeverTrumpers confessed why they want Hillary to win. They know they’ll have no access to the Trump White House if he wins. Nor would they have any access to a Hillary White House. The difference, however, is that their donor base would desert them in the event of a Trump victory, whereas they can raise money from donors in the event of a Hillary win.

We had figured this out. We’re just surprised to hear them admit it.

Further Questions About the ‘Alternative Right’

Jacques, in a debate in an earlier thread with Bob the Ape (sic!) writes:

[. . .] The mere fact that conservatism, or western civilization more generally, is the product of a specific group does not _imply_ that "it must remain the exclusive property of that group, or that that group is essential for its existence". On the other hand, there is no particular reason to believe that these things are _not_ the exclusive property of western peoples or that white Europeans are _not_ essential to the conservation and functioning of our western civilization. What evidence could anyone have for thinking that western civilization encodes principles or ways of being that are "true for everyone" or, more to the point, feasible for everyone? Obviously a healthy western society can do just fine with small numbers of foreigners, including even Australian Aborigines. But the question is whether our societies can thrive (or even exist) when non-whites, non-westerners, non-Christians are introduced in numbers so huge as to reduce white western Christians to minorities. I can't think of any reason for optimism about this scenario. And there's lots of evidence for the view that western civilization could only have been created and sustained by the specific racial-cultural groups that in fact created and sustained it. Certainly it seems far-fetched to imagine that groups such as the Aborigines have the capacity to produce anything like the civilization of Italy or England or France or Holland. These are groups who have never left the stone age. [. . .]

One claim Jacques seems to be making is that

C1. There is no reason to believe that Western civilization includes principles true for everyone.

Now (C1) strikes me as plainly false. Suppose we mean by a principle a true proposition fundamental to some body of knowledge. Accordingly, the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is a principle of logic. It is true and it is foundational. This principle, along with all the rest of the principles of logic, is not just true, but necessarily true. So they are true not only for every actual person but for every possible person. Is Jacques a relativist who thinks that the truths of logic vary from tribe to tribe, that LNC is true for whites but not for blacks, for Europeans but not for Australian aborigines? I hope not.

Obviously the same holds for the principles of mathematics and all the propositions derivable from these principles. They are necessarily true for all actual and possible persons.

All of these truths of logical and mathematics are true for everyone, not in the sense that they are accepted or believed by everyone, but in the sense that they are binding on everyone.

The principles of natural science, though presumably not necessarily true, being contingently true, are nonetheless true for all if true for any. Consider the principle of the additivity of velocities at pre-relativistic speeds. If a Zulu on a train fires a gun in the direction of train travel, the velocity of the projectile will be governed by this principle just as it will be if it were an Englshman doing the firing.

Further examples could be given, but the foregoing suffices to refute (C1). Another claim Jacques seems to be making is

C2. There is no reason to believe that the principles included in Western civilization are not the exclusive property of Western peoples.

Jacques is suggesting that the these principles are the exclusive property of Western peoples. The suggestion is absurd. No one has proprietary rights in truth. Truths cannot be owned. Pythagoras discovered the theorem of Pythagoras, but he did not thereby come to own it. If a German or an African uses the theorem to calculate the length of the hypotenuse on a right triangle is he violating Pythagoras' property rights, or those of his descendants?

Had Pythagoras invented the theorem bearing his name, then perhaps one could say that he owned it. But he didn't invent it; he discovered it. To latch onto a truth is to latch onto something absolute: the truth of a proposition is not subject to the whim of arbitrary creativity. A truth of mathematics is not like an advertising logo or a song. A song can be copyrighted, but not a truth.

Suppose I write a post in which I state some well-known truths in my own classy way. Impressed by my inimitable style, you decide to plagiarize my post. All you succeed in doing is plagiarizing my classy, or perhaps quirky, formulations: you cannot plagiarize the truths the formulations express. Plagiarism is literary theft. You can steal my formulations by copying without quoting and attributing the sentences I have constructed, but you cannot steal the truths, if any, that I have expressed via those formulations. I own the formulations, but not the truths they express. Truth is too noble a thing to be owned by the likes of me — or you. And what one cannot steal, one cannot own. Or to put the point with precision: if x cannot be stolen, then there cannot be any y such that y owns x. (Please run that proposition through your counterexample detector.)

The Egyptians measured land and so were involved in geo-metry, but it was the ancient Greeks, Euclid and the boys, who made of geometry an axiomatic deductive science. Those Greek geniuses discovered axiomatics. Did they own it? Is an Italian or a German who axiomatizes set theory guilty of theft, or 'cultural appropriation'?

And now we notice something very interesting. These alt-rightists are the mirror image of crazy leftists. This is no surprise inasmuch as they are reactionaries. He who reacts is defined by that against which he reacts. He has decided to dance with the pig and get dirty instead of eschewing the dance altogether. Thus to the identity politics of the Left, they oppose an identity politics of the Right, when what they ought to be doing is getting beyond identity politics altogether.

And if they maintain that the cultural goods we have in the West (logic, philosophy, science, law, engineering, architecture, music, art, Judeo-Christian ethics) are owned by Western peoples, then they will have to endorse some notion of illicit 'cultural appropriation' when non-Western peoples make use of them. But notice: if it is wrong for the Koreans, say, to appropriate the engineering know-how of Germans and Americans in their auto manufacturing and elsewhere, then why wasn't it wrong for the French and Italian mathematicians to 'culturally appropriate' the fruits of Greek mathematics?

The point here is that there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as Greek mathematics; there is mathematics and the Greeks were uncommonly gifted at getting at its truths. Do you alt-rightists think that there is Jewish physics and Aryan physics? Physics is physics. Race, ethnicity, class, and 'gender' are irrelevant when it comes to the contents of physics.

Are men as a group better than women as a group when it comes to contributing to math and phsyics? Yes. But it doesn't follow that there is male math and female math.

One of the alt-right fallacies, then, is to think that Western culture is somehow tied necessarily to Western peoples either by being true or normatively binding only for Western peoples, or by being owned by Western peoples. The fact that Western peoples originated this culture is irrelevant. What is Western in origin, and thus in this sense particular, is yet universal in validity.

More defensible than (C1) and (C2) is

C3. There is little or no reason to think that Western civilization includes ways of comportment that are feasible for everyone.

This is a large topic. I agree that our recent foreign policy has been irresponsibly interventionist.

But consider that the barbarian bastards from the North, the Goths and Visigoths and others who sacked Rome more than once and laid waste to the civilization of the Mediteranean — didn't those Teutonic and other bad asses end up getting civilized by the great Graeco-Roman, Judeo-Christian culture to the extent that, in the fullness of time, they could produce a Goethe and a Kant and a Beethoven?

I am not opposed to everything Jacques says above. I agree with, or at least find very plausible, these further claims:

C4. There is good reason to think that white Europeans are essential to the preservation of our Western civilization.

C5. Our civilization is at risk if Western Christians become a minority.

C6. "Western civilization could only have been created and sustained by the specific racial-cultural groups that in fact created and sustained it."

An Open Letter to Michael Rea from a Worried Gay Philosopher

Intelligence and Religion

The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.

Exaggeration and the Erosion of Credibility

Why do people exaggerate in serious contexts? The logically prior question is: What is exaggeration, and how does it differ from joking, lying, bullshitting, and metaphorical uses of language?

Donald Trump in the first of his presidential debates with Hillary Clinton made the astonishing claim that she has been fighting ISIS all her adult life.

Note first that Trump was not joking but making a serious point. But he couched the serious point in a sentence which is plainly false and known by all to be false. So he cannot be taxed with an intention to deceive. Since he had no intention of deceiving his audience, and since the point he was making (not merely trying to make) about Clinton's fecklessness is true, he was not lying. He was not bullshitting either since he was not trying to misrepresent himself as knowing something he does not know or more than he knows.

Our man was exaggerating. That is different from joking, lying, and bullshitting.

Extremity and Untenability

The extremity of a thesis is a defeasible indicator of its untenability.

Hillary ‘Won’ Last Night’s Debate

I spent the whole day yesterday at an auto dealership buying my wife a new car. But last night I didn't dream about the car, but about Hillary who appeared young and stunning and topless, but with very small breasts. What does this dream mean?

My subconscious was telling me that Hillary came across in the first debate much better than Trump (young and stunning) and that therefore she 'won' the debate despite her indefensible position (toplessness) and weak arguments (small breasts).

And 'win' she did. She threw the Orange Man onto the defensive and made him look bad. Despite his allegations of her lack of stamina, she stood there strong as a bull. She threw a lot of bull too, but it doesn't matter in these so-called debates. It's all about appearances. That's what the world runs on. That's what impresses people. Remember Ronald Reagan's contentless 'zingers'? "There you go again!" "Where's the beef?" (An allusion to a Wendy's restaurant commercial of the time.)

Some of us recall Nixon-Kennedy, 1960. You could see Nixon sweat. Sweat and scowl. An introvert in an extrovert's profession, he was no match for the charming and charismatic and lovable Jack Kennedy. He lost on appearances. But Nixon was the better man with the better arguments despite playing Captain Ahab to Kennedy's Prince Charming.

Trump missed opportunities to nail Hillary. She spouted standard liberal nonsense about 'gun violence' as if guns are violent, but nary a peep escaped her lying lips about the thug culture in black ghettos which is the real root of the problem. Similarly on the 'stop and frisk' matter. But Trump was stymied by his need to appeal to black voters.

You can't say to black people that, as a group, they, and in particular young black males, are more criminally inclined than whites, and that this is what justifies 'stop and 'frisk' profiling, for they will take it as racist insult, not as the plain truth, which is what it is.

I predict a win by Hillary in the general, by a small margin. I hope I am wrong.

A Hillary win will concern me as a citizen. But as a philosopher it will be of no concern. For the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.

The theme unpacked: The Owl of Minerva Spreads its Wings at Dusk

Addendum 1. 'Gun epidemic' is another obfuscatory phrase Hillary used last night. A characteristic conflation of the moral and the epidemiological that could arise only in the febrile brain of a liberal. The problem in the black ghettos is not too many guns, but too few fathers.

Addendum 2. I said above that a Hillary win would concern me as a citizen but not as a philosopher. But this was an uncharacteristic undialectical lapse on my part. For one cannot flourish as a philosopher in prison or in a totalitarian regime. The embodied philosopher must concern himself to some extent with politics as with the material conditions of his philosophizing.

Corrigendum 1. Dennis M. writes,

A correction: “Where’s the beef?” was from a Reagan debate, but it was a line Mondale used against him. That one didn’t do much, but Reagan’s quip about not using Mondale’s youth and inexperience against him did a lot to kill the worries people had after his somewhat listless performance in their first debate.

The Swinburne Dust Up at the Society for Christian Philosophers

Political correctness strikes again!

Apparently, Richard Swinburne, perhaps the most distinguished of contemporary philosophers of religion, had the chutzpah to defend a traditional Christian view of homosexuality at a meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers. This provoked the outrage of certain cultural Marxists.

If only a 'trigger warning' had been issued prior to Swinburne's address! Then the whole controversy might have been avoided. The girly girls and pajama boys could have padded off to their sandbox to play with their dolls until the start of the next session.

You might want to begin with Did Swinburne Get Swindled? at the conservative group weblog, Rightly Considered, which after a slow start is now righteously on a roll.

Update (9/27). Further commentary:

Rod Dreher, Shut Up, Bigot!

Edward Feser, Michael Rea Owes Richard Swinburne an Apology

Update (9/28). Yet more commentary:

Rod Dreher, "F-K You, A-holes," Argues Yale Philosopher

Required reading for a sense of the depth of the rot in contemporary academe. Here is the conclusion of Dreher's article:

The fact that a Yale philosophy professor not only holds such vicious opinions towards another professor who apparently only stated a historically standard Christian philosophical view of homosexuality, but who also did not hesitate to publicly denounce that professor in the most vulgar possible terms, is a striking sign of the revolutionary times. To give you a sense of the ideas that are considered so vile as to be unutterable, even in a Christian philosophers’ conference, I searched in Swinburne’s 2007 book Revelation to see what his view on homosexuality is. To my knowledge, there has been no transcript provided of his SCP talk, but numerous online comments by philosophers who were there said that there was nothing in it that Swinburne had not already said in Revelation (which was published by Oxford University Press, not known for being a purveyor of National Socialist tracts) It’s possible to search on Amazon and find the relevant pages in the Swinburne book. It starts on p. 304. As best I can tell, here is his argument:

Children need two parents. The inability to beget children is a “disability.”
Homosexuality, by this definition, is a disability.
Disabilities need to be prevented and cured.
What causes homosexuality? We don’t know, but it’s likely some combination of genetics and environment.
We can change the environmental conditions by discouraging people from homosexual acts, and embracing a homosexual identity.
There is always a possibility that the disability called homosexuality might be cured, so therapy should be considered. But as of now, we have no reason to think that it will be successful, except in a slight number of cases.
In any case, homosexuals should be encouraged to be chaste, just as heterosexuals should be encouraged to be chaste in the face of their own disordered sexual impulses.
We must show love and compassion to homosexuals (and others with disordered impulses), but real love and compassion implies wanting not what they want, but what is best for them.
Therefore, to love gays (and everybody else) is to desire that all who live outside the bounds of normative heterosexual marriage live in chastity.

This is a very common Christian argument from Scripture and the natural law. For a more detailed version of this argument, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teachings on the meaning of sex and sexuality. The Catholic Church teaches that all sexual acts and all sexual desire outside of heterosexual marriage (including masturbation, and use of pornography) are disordered, because they disrupt the purpose of sex (= the unity of the couple, open to the possibility of the conception of new life). This is why the Church condemns contraception as a deformation of the right use of sex. The Catechism calls homosexuality “intrinsically disordered” because it is a state of sexual desire that can in no way be rightly ordered.

One can easily see why contemporary philosophers would object to this, and theyshould object to it, philosophically, if it violates their principles. But the idea that what Swinburne said is some sort of crazy right-wing blast from the bowels of Hitleriana, not fit to be stated in philosophical company, is insane.

But I don’t think Stanley and his academic confreres are insane, not in the least. I think they are radical progressive ideologues. I think they deliberately want to demonize any philosophers who hold to the traditional Christian teaching on the meaning of sexuality, particularly homosexuality. One of the most prominent contemporary philosophers is Princeton’s Peter Singer, who has advocated bestiality (under certain conditions) and the extermination of handicapped newborns. Singer is welcome within contemporary philosophical circles … but Richard Swinburne is now to be anathematized?

Anybody with eyes can see what’s going on here. There is a cleansing underway. The fact that the Society of Christian Philosophers is allowing itself to be bullied by these people is deeply depressing. Christian philosophers ought to be defending Swinburne’s right to state his opinion, even if they disagree with that opinion.

(I should add here that one of the handful of reasons I would even consider voting for Trump is the certain knowledge that a Hillary Clinton administration would only further the cultural hegemony of cutthroat revolutionaries like Stanley and his fellow travelers.)

Hillary, Shrillary

Hillary 'My Turn' Clinton shrieks: Why aren't I 50 points ahead?

Questions about Meditation

An academic philosopher inquires:

As usual, I want to ask you about something (something you're free to blog about).

Since December 2015, I've practised mindfulness meditation, with low intensity. Just 20 minutes or so each or every other day, paying calm (if possible) attention to things as they were happening in my mind or in my body. It's been great, mainly as an antidote against anxiety.

These days I have asked myself, could I gain something more, or something deeper, from my practice? If so, how? By practising more intensively, even painfully? Or by praying during, or after, my practise? The first path is carved with admirable precision in some Buddhist, step-by-step manuals . . . . But it might eventually lead me into a land of — what seems like — mental disorder and metaphysical madness (sensory overload, intensive fear or disgust, the impression of no self and of the nullity of classical logic). On the other hand, no comparably detailed manuals for following the latter path seem to be available . . . .

So I wonder, what would be your suggestion to someone who considers meditating more seriously and in line with really good sources yet who wants to turn neither insane nor Buddhist?

First of all, I am glad to hear that you have taken up this practice. Philosophers especially need it since we tend to be afflicted with 'hypertrophy of the critical faculty' to give it a name. We are very good at disciplined thinking, but it is important to develop skill at disciplined nonthinking as well. Disciplined nonthinking is one way to characterize meditation. One attempts to achieve an alert state of mental quiet in which all discursive operations come to a halt.

It is very difficult, however, and 20 minutes every other day is not enough. You need to work up to 40-60 minute sessions every day. Early morning is best, the same time each morning. Same place, a corner of your study, say. Posture? Seated cross-legged on cushions, with the knees lower than the buttocks. Kneeling has spiritual value, but not for long periods of prayer or meditation. Breath? Slow, even, deep, from the belly.

There needn't be any physical pain; indeed, there shouldn't be. If the full lotus is painful, there is the half-lotus, and the Burmese posture. Depending on the state of my legs and joints, I adjust my body as needed for comfort and stability. A lttle hatha yoga is a useful preliminary. Or just plain stretching, holding each stretch for 20-30 seconds.

A certain mild ascesis, though, is sine qua non for successful meditation/contemplation. You have to live a regular life, follow the moral precepts, abstain from spiritual and physical intoxicants, and so on. A little reading the night before of Evagrios Pontikos, say, is indicated; filling your head with mass media dreck & drivel contraindicated.

Meditation is an inner listening. The receptivity involved, however, opens one to demonic influence. So there is a certain danger in going deep. It is therefore a good idea for a Christian meditator to begin his session with the Sign of the Cross, a confession of weakness in which one admits that one is no match for demonic agents, and a supplication for protection from their influence. I recommend you buy a copy of the spiritual classic, Unseen Warfare by Lorenzo Scupoli. (Available from Amazon.com) Anyone who attempts to make spiritual progress ought to expect demonic opposition. (Cf. St. Paul, Epistle to the Ephesians, 6:12:^"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.")

Since you are interested in the Buddhist approach to these matters, you may find useful my post, The Christian 'Anatta Doctrine' of Lorenzo Scupoli.

Could deep meditation drive one mad? I would say no if you avoid psychedelic drugs and lead an otherwise balanced life. You could meditate two hours per day with no ill effects.

But if you go deep, you will have unusual experiences some of which will be disturbing. There are the makyo phenomena described by Zen Buddhists. (Whether these phenomena should be described as the Zennists describe them is of course a further question.) For example, extremely powerful and distracting sexual images. I once 'heard' the inner locution, "I want to tear you apart." Inner locutions have a phenomenological quality which suggests, though of course it does not prove, that these locutions are not excogitated by the subject in question but come from without. Demonic interference?

But on another occasion I felt myself to be the object of a very powerful unearthly love. An unforgettable experience. A Christian will be inclined to say that what I experienced was the love of Christ, whereas a skeptic will dismiss the experience as a 'brain fart.' The phenomenology, however, cannot be gainsaid.

Will deep meditation and the experiences that result drive you to accepting Buddhist teaching according to which all is impermanent (anicca), unsatisfactory (dukkha), and devoid of self-nature (anatta)? I don't think so. Many Buddhists claim that these doctrine are verified in meditation. I would argue, however, that they bring their doctrines to their experiences and then illictly take the experiences as supporting the doctrines.

For example, if you fail to find the self in deep meditation does it follow that there is no self? Hardly. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Now that was quick and dirty, but I have expatiated on this at length elsewhere.

Does the path of meditation lead to the relativization of classical logic, or perhaps to its utter overthrow? This is a tough question about which I will say something in a subsequent post that examines Plantinga's critique of John Hick in the former's Warranted Christian Belief.

Finally, I want to recommend the two-volumed The Three Ages of the Interior Life (not the one-volumed edition) by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. (Available from Amazon.com) This is the summit of hard-core Catholic mystical theology. This is the real thing by the hardest of the hard-core paleo-Thomists. You must read it. No Francine namby-pamby-ism here.

How to Multiply One’s Vote

One way to circumvent 'One man, one vote' is by cheating. That's the liberal way. Vote early and vote often. Vote even if you are dead. Vote by mail and then in person. That liberals intend to make the polling places safe for voter fraud is clear from their breath-takingly sham arguments against photo ID.

The conservative way is to persuade others to vote as one does. Suppose my posts have convinced 100 fence sitters to vote for Trump. Then I will have generated 101 votes for the Orange Man.

Suppose these 100 repeat my arguments to their friends. And these friends . . . . You can see how this could have a serious effect.