Despite the horrors of Soviet Communism, the Allied winners of World War II owed a great deal to the Russian people. Russia's male and female soldiers were most responsible for destroying Hitler's vast ground forces, having killed more than two-thirds of the German soldiers lost in the war.
The Soviet Union lost about 27 million soldiers and civilians — about 60 times more than America lost in the war.
Month: November 2017
Planning to Carry?
Then read this.
Leftists want to strip you of your Constitutional rights. The arguments they employ are worthless when these emotion-driven dopes argue at all. You may think to resist them by exercising your rights. But grave responsibilities attend their exercise.
Know the law. Leftist shysters will surely try to use it against you should you have to shoot in self defense. Get training. Practice regularly. Proficiency with a handgun is the most difficult type of fire arms proficiency to attain.
Much more on this topic in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Extend First Amendment Speech Protection to Twitter and Google?
A tough bunch of issues. You figure it out. For me to expatiate further would require doing homework I don’t have time for. No job, no kids, no social commitments, no time!
Related: Free Speech: PragerU sues Google
Why Would Anyone Ever Need an AR-15?
Stephen Willeford has an answer for you.
The Russian Revolution and Communist Terror
The Marxists’ biggest targets have always been the family, religion, and civil society—institutional obstacles to the imposition of the omnipotent state. With the Bolsheviks in power, Lenin set out to destroy them.
Sounds like the Democrat Party program.
Obama did his damndest to undermine civil society. Luckily, he's history and his would-be leftist successor, Felonia von Pantsuit (HT: Kurt Schlichter) has been sent packing on her broom.
I now hand off to myself. If you study the following posts you will get some idea of what civil society is and why it is important:
The Greatest Temptation
I am repeatedly visited by the thought that the greatest temptation is the temptation to see the world as nothing but a system of finitudes and relativities with nothing beyond it or behind it. It is just a play of phenomena of no ultimate significance. There is the temptation to sink into a placid nihilism: nothing finite finally matters; there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not matter. And since nothing finite finally matters, there is nothing to get hung up about:
Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever.
This is not an angry nihilism, but something closer to the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.
How does this greatest temptation connect to ordinary temptation?
It is spring, a time of enhanced sexual temptation. One's resistance to temptation is resistance without yesteryear's assurance of the evil of acquiescence. Is there really a soul about whose care one ought to be concerned? Perhaps we die utterly and it just does not matter, finally or ultimately, whether we resist or indulge these paltry temptations. Pleasure is here and now. It is concretely and undeniably real even if fleeting, unlike speculations and scruples about God and the soul and the moral law which are endlessly debatable.
You're able and she's willing. It's consensual. In a while you will both be dead and it won't matter to anyone that you found an hour's pleasure in this way in violation of a monastic vow, or a marital vow, or a philosopher's vow to eschew the blandishments of the flesh the better to secure insight into the really real by keeping undimmed the eyes of the soul.
So you indulge, but not with the settled knowledge or firm belief that the act is wrong, but in a state of doubt whether it is wrong, or more radically, like a Pyrrhonist, in a state of aporia as to whether or not the whole moral question matters or even makes sense.
The greatest temptation, I said, is the temptation to think that nothing finite finally matters; that there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not itself matter. My suggestion is that acquiescence in this greatest of all temptations mightily aids and abets acquiescence in ordinary temptation.
It is a temptation so deep that I am 'tempted' to say that, compared to it, the temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed is an ordinary temptation, a temptation that presupposes but does not question Ultimate Mattering and the nonrelative opposition of good and evil.
Gender Appropriation?
There is much inane talk these days of 'cultural appropriation.' Is it 'gender appropriation' when women wear pants?
Of Death and Detachment
St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, p. 11:
My Lord, since Thou hast given me light to know that what the world esteems is all mere vapour and folly, give me strength to detach myself from it before death detaches me.
I find it very interesting that 'detach' is being used in two very different senses in this passage. The one sense is spiritual while the other is physical.
The saint is praying that he be given the strength to detach himself spiritually from the transient objects of worldly desire before death physically detaches him or his soul from his body. The saint is not assuming that physical detachment will occasion spiritual detachment. To expect such a thing would be naive. It would be as if a man who spent his entire life 'on the make,' in hot pursuit of property and pelf, pleasure and power, were suddenly at death to renounce the earthly lures and to have a burning desire to meet his Maker.
The saint is assuming, though, that spiritual detachment can be achieved only while one is in the body, and that after one quits it one will be stuck with the spiritual attachments one has at the hour of death.
Physical death does not have the power to detach me spiritually from worldliness with its vapours and follies. For this is possible: my body dies but my soul lives on fully attached to the objects of worldly desire. We may speculate that Hugh Hefner is presently still lusting after nubile females. It is just that he presently lacks the physical apparatus with which to realize his lusts.
This too is possible: I remain physically attached to my body while living spiritually detached from the bagatelles of this life.
This is a fertile field for further thought. What exactly is spiritual attachment? How is it put in place, and how is it mitigated? One mode of mitigation is by meditation: one distances mentally from one's thoughts; one observes them as from a distance, refusing to live in or lose oneself in them.
And how can the soul be physically attached to the body if only one of them is physical? Is perhaps the soul's physical attachment to the body reducible to a special sort of spiritual attachment whereby I become embodied by spiritually attaching myself to a chunk of the physical world, a particular animal organism? By taking a particular animal organism to be me?
Race and America’s Soul
Myron Magnet – -Is he an attractive man? – - gets it right, or rather the author he is reviewing does:
What gives Gene Dattel’s Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure its special power is that, even after its bracingly original and thoroughly researched account of the racism of the abolitionist North from the late eighteenth century until long after the Civil War, the book nevertheless does not shrink from laying the ills of today’s black American underclass not at the door of a painful history, with ample blame for northern as well as southern whites, but squarely at the feet of black Americans themselves. Yes, shameful, deeply shameful, were slavery, Jim Crow, and northern racism, and who can doubt that they left grievous scars? Still, America fought a war to end the evil institution, had a civil rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do. Now, Dattel argues, it’s up to black Americans to save themselves.
Exactly right. It is time for blacks to take responsibility for their lives and get off the plantation. Will the Left let them?
Related: The Importance of Self-Control
A ‘Marxist’ Explanation of the Trump Revolution
A good explanation, but not particularly Marxist.
Sunday Morning Sermon: Moral Failure
We fall back again and again into our old bad habits because of our weakness on all levels: the flesh, the heart, the will, and the intellect. Our minds are dark, our wills are weak, our hearts are foul. How do we know this? By honest self-examination and a refusal to evade the truth.
The will is not strong enough to tame the animal in us and control its natural tendencies; but it is strong enough to suborn the intellect and persuade it to rationalize the free will's wrong decisions.
A will too weak to tame the flesh is yet strong enough to suborn the intellect.
Because we cannot significantly improve ourselves by our own efforts, we must seek help elsewhere, but obviously not from those who are as wretched as we are, which is to say, from fellow human beings.
A Philosopher’s Prayer
We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that nourishes the flesh we can gain for ourselves.
……………..
For the theology behind the prayer, see "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread."
The Value of Philosophy
What good is philosophy?
It teaches humility in point of knowledge and belief. It lays bare the infirmity of reason. It prompts us to seek other sources of insight, including mystical intuition and divine revelation, while supplying us with the tools for their evaluation and critique. Its problems, though insoluble, can serve as koans.
Good philosophy debunks bad philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, scientism, epistemic pretense, bad religion, and bad politics. It is a mighty curb on fanaticism of all sorts, that of the religionists as well as that of the anti-religionists. It keeps Jerusalem in check even while it is itself fed and enlivened by Hierosolymic themes and tropes. While serving as prophylaxis on excess and overreach, it yet makes possible a reasoned faith and a reasoned mysticism.
And it does all of this critically and skeptically in the best sense of the term: in the spirit of rational inquiry. It is an enemy of the dogmatism of the religionists and that of politically correct leftist anti-religionists.
So philosophy, while in some ways miserable, is in many ways magnificent.
In any case it is necessary for the good life and worthy of spirited defense, with blood and iron if need be, against the anti-civilizational forces of leftism and radical Islam which work in synergy, whether wittingly or unwittingly.
The Misery of Philosophy II
One goes round and round on the dialectical merry-go-round. Thoughts lead to thoughts which lead to more thoughts, including inconclusive thoughts, semantically indeterminate thoughts, mutually contradictory thoughts. Words beget words unto endlessness. On the side of the subject one never penetrates to the source of thoughts. And on the side of the object one never arrives at the root of the real.
I would understand subjectivity and existence. But I am stymied by the infirmity of reason.
The Misery of Philosophy I
Philosophy is endless because inconclusive. But how is knotting one's thread with a dogma better than going on endlessly? After all, what we want is knowledge of truth, not the mere fixation of belief.