The famous show about nothing finds its political equivalent in a certain investigation about nothing.
Month: June 2017
Thinking Concretely About Death
When my death seems 'acceptable,' a 'natural' occurrence, I wonder whether I am thinking about it concretely and honestly enough. I wonder whether I am really confronting my own utter destruction as a subject for whom there is a world, as opposed to myself as an object in the world. If I view myself as object, I can 'hold myself in reserve' and imagine that I as subject will somehow survive destruction. I can think of death as a drastic transition rather than as annihilation — which it may well be.
If you say it is certain that death is annihilation, then I pronounce you a dogmatic fool.
Don’t Spoil Your Success
You may spoil your success if you compare it with someone else's. Beware of comparison. Not all comparison is invidious, but the potential for envy is there. Invidia is the Latin for 'envy.' An invidious comparison, then, is one that elicits envy. One can avoid envy by avoiding comparison. To feel diminished in one's sense of self-worth by the accomplishments of another is the mark of a loser.
One ought to celebrate the accomplishments of others since in many cases they redound to one's own benefit.
If you cannot be satisfied with who you are and what you have, you will never be content. And if you are never content, then never happy. There is more to happiness than contentment, but the latter is an ingredient in the former.
One Step Forward, One Step Back
Forward: The Southern border is being secured. And this despite the obstructionism of the donkeys.
Back: U. S. Army goes 'transgender.' Here:
The Army has begun mandatory transgender sensitivity training for soldiers. The training covers everything from “transfemale” soldiers to transgender shower etiquette to dealing with a male soldier who becomes pregnant.
Interesting times, these. How could anyone be bored?
A Toxic Culture
A toxic culture it is in which lack of self-discipline is promoted, self-indulgence of every sort is encouraged, self-reliance and individual responsibility are ridiculed, everything becomes a disease or addiction, big government is promoted as the solution to every problem, and the right to free expression is misused to spread hate and incite violence.
If Agreement is Out of Reach . . .
. . . then I think there are two conclusions to be drawn. The first is that we ought not allow into our midst individuals and groups with radically different values and commitments. The second is that we ought to be as tolerant as we can of the differences among those we do admit into our midst.
No comity without commonality.
No comity without toleration.
Can You Obstruct a Fraud?
Andrew C. McCarthy is rock-solid.
‘Liberals’ Lack Standards
And when they have them they tend to be double standards.
Plain Talk About Transgenderism
Sometimes the cure for P. C. is C.P. , Camille Paglia, that is:
It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.
The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.
And a fortiori for transracialism.
Robert Spencer Poisoned in Iceland
Robert Spencer explains on YouTube.
Mark Steyn, The Poisoning of Robert Spencer
Concision at War with Redundancy
One of my faults as a writer is that I am prolix. I almost wrote ‘excessively prolix,’ which would have illustrated the fault in question. Piling ‘excessively’ onto ‘prolix’ would not only have been unnecessary, but would also have suggested that one can be prolix in moderation. But wordiness is a vice, and vices should be extirpated, not moderated.
Some years back, The Wall Street Journal described itself as “the daily diary of the American dream.” A delightful pleonasm: ‘diary’ derives from the Latin dies, day. A daily diary is like one of Al Franken’s lying liars. I learned recently that ‘journal’ also derives from Latin dies even though they have no letters in common. A fact like that excites a guy like me. Dies gave rise to diurnus, which became the Italian giornale and the French journal, passing into English as ‘journal’ circa 1590. (Vide Robert Hendrickson, QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed., 2004, p. 400) By the way, this is a fascinating book, and I recommend it.
Here are some other examples of redundant expressions, culled from Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Grace and Clarity (Chicago, 1990, p. 116): past memories, basic fundamentals, true facts, important essentials, future plans, personal beliefs, consensus of opinion, sudden crisis, terrible tragedy, end result, final outcome, initial preparation, free gift. No doubt some of these are disputable. Suppose you set aside six months to prepare for a marathon. You begin by running 30 miles per week, gradually working up to 45 mile weeks. It would make sense to say that your initial preparation was less demanding than the later phases of your preparation. There is no redundancy here.
And what about future plans? ‘Plan’ is ambiguous as between the act of planning and its object. No doubt the object of planning is always later than the act of planning, just as the object of remembering is always earlier than the act of remembering. Hence ‘future plan’ is redundant when used to refer to the object of planning. But it is not redundant when used to refer to the act of planning. An act of planning can lie in the future, in the present, or in the past. If every use of ‘future plan’ were redundant, then every use of ‘past plan’ and ‘present plan’ would be oxymoronic. But it is no oxymoron to say, ‘My past plans all went unrealized,’ or ‘My present plan is to sell the vacation house.’
By similar reasoning, one should be able to convince oneself that past memories has non-redundant uses. An old man might complain, ‘My present memories are not as vivid as my past memories.’ This is not redundant because an act of remembering can lie in the past.
One conclusion to be drawn is that good writing is not a mechanical affair: it cannot be reduced to rules and regulations, algorithms and checklists. Did you catch ‘rules and regulations’? That is a redundancy and I used it purposely to test you. ‘Regulation’ is from the Latin regula, meaning rule. There is also the connection to rex, regis, king, ruler. And so on and so forth.
The Fallacy of Objections
Via Vlastimil V.:
There is something "which may be called the Fallacy of objections, i.e. showing that there are objections against some plan, theory or system, and thence inferring that it should be rejected; when that which ought to have been proved, is, that there are more, or stronger objections against the receiving than the rejecting of it. This is the main, and almost universal Fallacy of infidels, and is that of which men should be first and principally warned." Richard Whately, Logic, 1849, ch. V "On Fallacies," p. 82. See here.
How quaint our concern with the lore of logic while jihadi's cut throats on London Bridge and leftist thugs shout down the sane at universities. Logic books and books in general are of no use against barbarians and thugs. Magazines are much more effective.
Redundancy of the Day: ‘Future Prognosis’
According to a news report, doctors will not speculate on the 'future prognosis' of Otto Warmbier. As opposed to what? His present prognosis?
Incitement to Violence
Sullivan is Right: Universalism Hasn’t Been Debunked
Andrew Sullivan is down with a very bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But he hasn't lost his mind entirely. He is hip to the absurdity of leftist talk about cultural appropriation. After wading through yet another load of his anti-Trump hyperventilatory hysteria, I came upon these reasonable words of his:
I love the phrase “long-debunked universalism” by the way. Debunked by whom? Universalism — the idea that human beings can exist as individuals, rather than as members of assigned groups — is far from debunked. It is, in fact, one core premise of liberal society.
Sully is right, but it is not easy to state clearly what is at issue here or what it even means to "exist as individuals rather than as members of assigned groups." A while back I was complaining about tribalism and I was saying things like: we need to get beyond tribal and racial and other particularistic self-identifications; we need to learn to see ourselves and others as individuals and not as tokens of types or members of groups. To my surprise, certain alt-righties disagreed with me, seeming to say that what we need to oppose black tribalism, say, is not a transcendence of tribalism, but an equal but opposite white tribalism.
Now that makes no sense to me, except as a sort of interim or stop-gap defensive measure. If some black dude gets in my face about the how great it is to be black, I will be tempted to get in his face and reply in kind.
But that sort of thing does not comport well with my irenic, philosophical nature. We need to transcend our tribalisms and learn to respect each other as persons with equal rights. We are equal as persons!
But what could that mean? Is it not just empty talk? It sounds like the pious verbiage of a preacher or a politician who doesn't really believe what he is saying but says it because he is paid to do so.
Talk of equal rights and respect for persons is indeed empty if naturalism is true. If we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal, then talk of equality is blather. For we are obviously not equal empirically either as individuals or as groups. The alt-righties and neo-reactionaries hammer on this point and they are correct in so doing. So normative equality cannot be grounded in empirical equality if for no other reason than that there is no empirical equality. On the other hand, normative equality cannot 'float in the air.' It cannot subsist independently of any basis in reality.
What then could possibly ground our normative equality as persons with equal rights to life, liberty, and property, if we are nothing but complex physical systems? If there is no equality in fact, how could there be in norm?
If naturalism is true, what could make it morally wrong always and everywhere and for everyone — not just pragmatically or prudentially inadvisable in particular circumstances — for one group to enslave another? Nothing that I can see. Not the ability to reason since, on naturalism, that is just an empirical feature of human organisms. In any case, the ability is not equally present in human animals. Hoe could a non-normative property, unequally distributed, ground a right to be tretaed with respect and never to be treated as a means only? If you say that all normal humans have the ability to reason to some degree or other, then you are abstracting away from our differences. How could that abstraction, which remains on the non-normative plane, ground a right to be treated equally?
Here is the problem expressed as an aporetic tetrad:
1) Humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups.
2) Talk of the normative equality of persons, that each ought to be treated as an end and never merely as a means (Kant), is empty if it cannot be provided with a basis in concrete non-normative reality.
3) Naturalism is true: concrete reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.
4) Persons are normatively equal.
The limbs of the tetrad are inconsistent; something has to give. (1) is non-negotiably true as a matter of plain fact. (2) is extremely plausible, and we are committed to (4) if, as our moral intuitions instruct us, slavery, sex trafficking, and the like are moral abominations. So I reject (3).
If (3) is false, then it is possible that theism is true. If all finite persons are creatures of one and the same infinite person, then all persons are metaphysically equal. This metaphysical fact is then the non-normative basis that grounds the normative equality of persons.
Question for atheists: If you hold that slavery is morally wrong, what on your view makes it morally wrong?