And this miserable flake had the chutzpah to steal Barry Goldwater's title, "Conscience of a Conservative"?
A paltry 100 semolians?
The good news is that Flake is history and Milque-Toast McCain will soon be as well. No, I don't want the latter dead; I want him and his obstructionism out of the Senate.
The UT philosopher Rob Koons has penned an important article, Loyalty to Trump Important in Two-Party System.
Please read it. Several cuts above the usual political column.
Liberals playing the 'mental' card is nothing new. You may recall the Johnson campaign's smearing of Barry Goldwater with "In your guts you know he's nuts." That was in 1964. So forgive me for not being impressed when sufferers from Trump Derangement Syndrome pronounce Donald Trump unfit for office on the ground of insanity.
Just how sane are anti-Trumpers? John Pepple:
. . . I believe all these people (and not just Americans, but also their counterparts throughout the Western world) are themselves insane, and what’s more, they are suicidally insane, while as far as I know, Trump is not suicidally insane. I’ve been saying this for ages, but I will say it again. These people all seem to believe that it is the height of progressiveness these days to welcome into the West people who are not a bit progressive and who already have a track record of deliberately murdering lots of progressives and even of destroying the progressive movement in at least one country (Iran back in 1979). This is like Jews inviting Nazis into Israel, or blacks supporting the KKK. It's sheer insanity.
Real philosophers smoke.
I. Materials (from Husserl’s letters)1
Husserl asks Johannes Daubert to order cigars from tobacconist Rennert in Munich (November 11, 1906):
For Saturday (for an evening of pleasant company) I would need a good import, say around 40 or 45 DM per thousand, but only a small box of 25. It is probably better if you, with your connoisseur’s eye, make the selection, rather than that I just write to Rennert. Size, big if possible. Would you be so kind? The following could be added, if the opportunity presents itself: 25 pieces 656 (Sumatra), 25 pieces 667 (Mexico), 25 pieces 631. Also Hermann Oldenkott 3/4 pound O, 1/4 pound W, 1/4 R, 1/4 K, as well as 200 grams of Austrian Varinas. Since this is likely to amount to a tidy sum, do you suppose Rennert will apply the usual discount?
Husserl thanks Daubert (November 18, 1906):
So, many thanks for the trouble you have taken. Of course I find everything excellent. The Upmann in particular is worthy of the Elysian Fields. To be sure, it takes nerve to deal with its potency. That my work of the last few weeks has been productive is largely thanks to your “stimulation,” which in this case means: the tobaccological stimulation of your shipment.
I couldn't find an image depicting Husserl smoking a cigar, so enjoy the following in its stead:
Ambiguity. A property of linguistic expressions, primarily. An expression is ambiguous if it has two or more distinct meanings. Back in the day a guy asked me, "Where's your head, man?" I thought he was inquiring into my psychological state, but he merely needed to relieve himself. 'Head' is ambiguous. In its nautical use it refers to a toilet. Ambiguity is either syntactic or semantic. The example lately offered is semantic.
Amphiboly. An amphiboly is a syntactic ambiguity. Scope ambiguity is one subspecies. Consider 'Whatever happens must happen.' On an innocuous parsing with the modal operator operating on the whole sentence, it comes out a trivial logical truth:
Necessarily, whatever happens, happens.
But if the modal operator is imported into the sentence and attached to the consequent of the conditional, we get a probably false piece of fatalist metaphysics:
Whatever happens, necessarily happens.
Equivocation. An equivocation is a semantic ambiguity. Consider this abortion argument:
The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.
Is 'part' being used in the same sense in the first and second premises? If not, the argument succumbs to the fallacy of equivocation. I would say that the argument does so succumb. For the minor to be uncontroversially true, the term 'part' must be given a narrow reading that exclude the fetus. But for the major to be true, 'part' must be construed broadly so as to include it. Ergo, etc.
Vagueness. If an ambiguous expression harbors a multiplicity of distinct meanings, a vague expression lacks a definite meaning. Ambiguity and vagueness should therefore not be confused. To have multiple definite meanings is not the same as to have no one definite meaning.
Generality. Statements divide into the singular and the general. General statements divide into the universal, the particular, and the generic. 'Socrates is a man' is singular. 'All men are mortal' and 'Some mortals are men' are universal and particular respectively. 'Germans are industrious' is generic. For more on generics see Generic Statements.
Please avoid the phrase 'vague generalities.' Just as you shouldn't confuse ambiguity with vagueness, you shouldn't confuse vagueness with generality. Most generalizations have a definite meaning.
Disambiguation. If an expression is ambiguous, then it cries out for disambiguation. To disambiguate is to remove ambiguity by listing the different meanings of a word or phrase or sentence.
Class dismissed.
Evan Sayet explains:
My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer:
We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.
This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.
I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”
Read it all. The main point is that it is a war and in a war in which the enemy employs Alinkyite tactics we must do the same. The USA as she was founded to be is teetering on the brink of destruction. We are at a crucial juncture in our history and Trump, as bad as he is, is all we have.
This is the fourth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 64-71 of Chapter Four, pp. 64-91, entitled "Quality."
The Meaning Question and the Quality Question
These are different questions. Although for Benatar no human life has what he calls "cosmic" meaning, a life can have a high degree of what he calls "terrestrial" meaning even if its quality is low, and a life can have a low degree of terrestrial meaning even if its quality is high. The life of Nelson Mandela, for example, had a high degree of terrestrial meaning despite its low quality due to his long incarceration. On the other hand, "The meaningless life of a jet-setting playboy millionaire might be regarded as a life of high quality (by some)." (66)
Though distinct, meaning and quality are related. If I feel my life to be meaningful, then this feeling will enhance its quality whether or not my life really is meaningful. Conversely if I feel my life to be meaningless. Or suppose the quality of my life degrades drastically. This may cause me to question its meaning. If one's life is of high quality, however, this is no guarantee that one will not question its meaning.
Benatar's Thesis on the Quality of Life
The common view is that while some lives are on balance bad, others are on balance good. Benatar rejects the common view holding that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (67) No human life, then, is good, not even the best life. This is a very strong thesis. Benatar is not telling us that many or most human lives are objectively bad, but that every single instance of human life is objectively bad. Some lives are worse than others but all are objectively bad. One can appreciate how this will feed into his anti-natalism.
An Obvious Objection
One might object that the sole authority on the quality of one's life is the liver of that life. As a philosophizing gastroenterologist once said, "It all depends on the liver." (Is the James attribution to the left accurate? Paging Dave Lull!) So if my life seems to me to be good, then it is good, and no one can tell me otherwise. How could one be mistaken about the quality of one's own life? If the quality of one's life is the felt quality thereof, the quality as it appears to the subject of the life, and the felt quality is good, then it would make no sense to say that the quality is in reality worse than the subject feels it to be and that one is mistaken about the quality of one's life.
If, on the other hand, one meant by the quality of a human life a wholly objective feature that it has, irrespective of the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the subject or 'liver' of the life, then one could be mistaken about its quality. But obviously the quality of a life is not a wholly objective feature of it. This is because a human life concretely understood is a lived live, a conscious and self-conscious life, a life from a point of view, a felt life, a life in which subjectivity and objectivity are blended in such a way as to be teased apart only by a process of abstraction that is arguably falsifying.
Clearly, quality of life is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. Not wholly subjective, because we have animal bodies that are parts of the physical world. Not wholly objective, because we are conscious and self-conscious beings. Given this blending of subjective and objective, the question is whether there is nonetheless an objective fact of the matter as to the quality of one's life.
Response to the Objection: Judgments About Quality are Unreliable
Benatar tells that there are three psychological phenomena that impair self-assessment of well-being.
a) Optimism Bias. People tend to see themselves as happier than they really are. One reason is that people tend to suppress negative memories. Another is that people are irrationally prone to think that good things will happen to them in the future. Because of optimism bias, subjective assessments of well-being are unreliable.
b) Adaptation. Suppose something very bad happens: you lose the use of your legs. Your subjective self-assessment of well-being drops precipitously. "In time, however, subjective assessment of quality of life will improve as one adjusts to the paralysis." (69) And this despite the fact that one's objective condition has not improved. The point, them, is that the subjective assessment of well-being does not accurately track one's objective quality of life and is therefore unreliable.
c) Comparison. Subjective assessments of well-being and quality of life involve comparisons with others. Suppose you note that you are no worse off than many others. This contributes to the illusion that the bad features of all human lives are not as bad as they actually are. If what I just written is less than clear, it is because what Benatar wrote at the bottom of p. 69 is less than clear.
The main point, however, is clear. Benatar is claiming that for most of us our subjective assessments of well-being are inaccurate and tend toward the optimistic. Most of us fail to see that the quality of our lives is worse than we think it is. It doesn't follow from this, however, that the quality of our lives is very bad. To show this requires a second step. I will discuss the second step in a subsequent post. What we now must decide is whether Benatar's response to the objection is tenable.
Can One Be Mistaken About the Quality of One's Life? Is There an Objective Fact of the Matter?
Benatar is telling us that for most of us the quality of our lives is objectively worse than we think it is. The objection above was that my life has the quality I feel it to have, and that about this I cannot be mistaken. Benatar's response, however, seems merely to beg the question by assuming that one can be mistaken about the quality of one's life. By assuming that one can be mistaken, Benatar assumes that there is some objective fact of the matter about the quality of one's life and of human life generally. Benatar assumes that each human life has an objective quality that is what it is regardless of what the agent of that life believes or feels. But that is precisely what is denied by someone who holds that the subjectively felt quality of one's life is partially constitutive of the quality of one's life.
The latter view can be defended.
One thing we can all agree on is that objective factors bear upon the quality of one's life. These are factors that don't depend on what we feel or how we think or what our attitudes are. No matter how stoically I endure a sprained ankle, the objective fact is that the ankle is sprained. Equally true, however, is that if I were an insentient robot with a sprained ankle, there would be no point to talk of the quality of my life. A robot, not being alive, has no quality of life. Quality of life is felt quality just as life is sentient life. Quality in this discussion has an ineliminable subjective component. Quality of life includes both an objective and a subjective component. This reflects the fact that I am not merely an object in the physical world, but also a subject who experiences his being an object in the physical world open to its rude impacts.
I submit that what I have just said is part of the non-negotiable data of the problem. If so, it is hard to see how one's life could have an objective quality independent of what one feels and thinks.
Imagine two physically indiscernible hikers on a hike together. Each sprains his left ankle in the same way at the same time. The physical damage is the same in both cases. But the hikers differ in their attitudes toward their injuries. The one is a philosopher who has practiced Buddhist and Stoic mind control techniques. He is adept at mastering aversion. The other is a person who wails and complains and exaggerates the badness of the negative event. He blames his partner for hiking too fast or for taking him on a route that is rocky and dangerous, etc. He makes things worse for himself with his negative attitude. Clearly, the quality of life of the second hiker is worse than that of the first at the time of the accident. And this despite the sameness of objective conditions.
This seems to cast doubt on the idea that one could be mistaken about the quality of one's life. I grant of course that one could be mistaken about the objective factors bearing upon the quality of one's life. In the above example, I might not realize the severity of the sprain, or I might mistake a bone fracture for a sprain. But if the quality of one's life is compounded of both objective and subjective elements, it is hard to see how I could be subject to correction by an outsider observer.
A Temporal Consideration
Benatar speaks of the "overall quality of one's life." Part of what he means by this is the quality of one's life as a temporal whole including past, present, and future. Whether or not a person is a primary substance in Aristotle's sense, a person's life is a process and thus a whole of temporal parts or phases. The past phases are subjectively real only in memory, and the future phases only in anticipation. The present alone counts for my happiness. From the lived first-person perspective, if I am happy now, then I am happy. One cannot be tenselessly happy. Whether or not in general to exist = to exist now as presentists in the philosophy of time maintain, our mode of existence is such that to exist = to exist now.
If so, one is well-advised to avoid dwelling on negative memories. For they adversely affect the only happiness there is, the happiness of the present. And this is what most happy and healthy people do: they either forget the past insofar as it was painful, or they learn to regard it with cool detachment, preseving its lessons, but without affect. In this way they enhance the happiness of the present. And similarly with regard to future ills. They hope for the best and prepare for the worse, but without worry.
If I suppress negative memories, thereby enhancing the quality of my life, does this lead to an inaccurate assessment of the quality of my life? Only if my life is a whole each phase of which is equally real. Then, to have an accurate objective view I would have to consider each phase of my life past, present, and future. I would have to adopt an atemporal perspective on a life which is essentially temporal. But such a perspective is falsifying. My life wells up moment by moment in a moving present: my mode of existence is not tenseless but essentially tempotal. The present phase alone is subjectively real and relevant to happiness or well-being.
So one could say that the suppression of negative memories (which, qua memorial acts, are in the present) is just good happiness-hygiene, and not the source of an inaccurate view of the quality of my life as a whole. There is no such thing as my life as a whole except by a falsifying abstraction from my lived life in the standing-streaming present. Hence there is no objective fact of the matter concerning my life as a whole.
I should think that the philosophizing gastroenterologist is right in the end: the quality of one's life depends on the liver and his attitudes and mental hygiene.
The lesser lights of yesteryear often burn more brightly in the firmament that lasts than the widely-acclaimed luminaria of the present but soon-to-be past.
Here. I used to have a fairly high opinion of Bret Stephens. What happened to him?
Here is my detailed and measured critique of Bret Stephens on the topic of disagreement. It begins like this:
Our national life is becoming like philosophy: a scene of endless disagreement about almost everything. The difference, of course, is that philosophical controversy is typically conducted in a gentlemanly fashion without bloodshed or property damage. Some say that philosophy is a blood sport, but no blood is ever shed, and though philosophers are ever shooting down one another's arguments, gunfire at philosophical meetings is so far nonexistent. A bit of poker brandishing is about as far as it gets.
There are many beings or existents, but they have something in common: they exist. Call what they have in common 'existence.' Now what is existence? And does existence itself exist in reality outside the mind?
For me, existence is that which makes concrete things be, outside their causes, outside the mind, outside of language and its logic, outside of the realm of mere possibility, and outside of nothing. Existence or Being is what makes beings be. I take this to imply that existence cannot be a concept under which existents fall or a property they instantiate.
For some, however, existence is a subjective concept, a concept dependent on minds such as ours. If so, the relation between the Moon, say, and existence is one of falling-under: the Moon falls under the subjective concept, existence, and the Moon exists in virtue of falling under this concept.
There are two obvious problems with this. The first is that the existence of the Moon cannot depend on the existence of minds like ours. The Moon existed before we existed, and were we not to exist, the Moon would still exist. The first point is temporal, the second modal: not every possible world in which the Moon exists is a world in which there are beings who deploy concepts. This two-pronged objection could be circumvented by maintaining that existence is an objective concept, or a property, one that does not depend on minds like ours. But then a different problem arises.
The problem is one of explanatory circularity. An individual x cannot fall under a concept C unless x exists. Thus the Moon falls under the concept natural satellite only if the Moon exists. The relation falling-under cannot obtain unless both of its relata exist. No problem arises in the case of the Moon's falling under natural satellite. But a problem arises if we suppose that existence is a first-level concept. One moves in an explanatory circle if one maintains both that (a) the Moon exists because it falls under the concept, existence, and (b) the concept, existence, has the Moon as an instance because the Moon exists. This objection is fatal to every theory of existence that conceives existence as abstractly common to existing things. The very existence of a thing cannot be its having a property or falling under a concept since it wouldn't be there at all if it didn't already (logically speaking) exist.
So I say: existence cannot be a first-level subjective or objective concept.
Followers of Frege appreciate that existence cannot be a first-level concept, but they make the mistake of conceiving of it as a second-level concept. They think of existence as a property of concepts, the property of being instantiated. Thus existence is not a property of cats, but a property of the concept cat, the property of being instantiated. This highly influential theory gets one thing right: it accommodates the insight that existence is no part of what a thing is. This insight is of course an old one. One finds it in Kant and before him in Aquinas, and before him in Avicenna to mention only three luminaries.
Kant made it clear that there is no quidditative difference – no difference as to quiddity or whatness – between a merely possible hundred dollars and an actually existing hundred dollars. And Aquinas was quite clear as to the difference between the questions Quid est? (What is it?) and An est? (Is it?) and the irreducibility of the latter to the former. Frege and his followers can be read as agreeing with Aquinas and Kant as to the negative thesis that existence is no part of what anything is. But there are serious problems with Frege's positive thesis that existence is a second-level concept. The positive thesis has the intolerable consequence of divorcing existence from the very things that primarily exist, namely, concrete individuals.
So I say: existence can be neither a first-level nor a second-level concept.
If you grasp this, then you are ready to tackle the problem of existence. If not, not.
Let's get things off to a rousing start with
Bob Seger, Old Time Rock and Roll. But does it really soothe the soul, or rather stoke The Fire Down Below? This one goes out to Al 'Grope' Franken. I hereby proffer some friendly avuncular advice to my distaff readers, all three of them: never underestimate the ferocity of that fire. Good men battle it all their lives; bad men give into it.
Moody Blues, Your Wildest Dreams. The best ode to Boomer nostalgia.
Beatles, In My Life
Billie Holliday, The Way You Looked Tonight. An uncommonly long intro. I first heard this old tune in the The Lettermen version in 1961.
Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, et al., My Back Pages. Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert.
Dionne Warwick, Always Something There to Remind Me
Kinks, Come Dancing
UPDATE (12/3) A reader likes the Holliday selection:
Thank you for posting Billie last night. Nothing that Teddy Wilson did was ever bad, in my view, and often approached greatness. The tp solo at 0:40 is by Irving Randolph, one of the best artists of the 1930s, up there with Bunny Berigan (who his style resembles, and both are based on Armstrong). This is one of four titles recorded in sessions for Brunswick in NY, Oct 1936. Unfortunately his playing never recovered after an illness in 1939, and his work is rare. Here he is with Billie in Who Loves You, from the same sessions. There is also some stellar work by Wilson starting 1:48. Krupa is on drums, in unusually restrained mode.
As for Bunny Berigan, here he is in "I Can't Get Started" from 1937. More from the reader:
And thanks for posting the Berigan! Another creative soul destroyed by the bottle. When asked how he was able to play so well while drunk, he supposedly replied, “I practice drunk.” On one recording, can’t remember which, he actually had to be held up in order to play. But the playing was sublime.
In New York, on the day of the recording, August 7, 1937, Berigan was late, leading several band members to find him drunk in a bar on 147th Avenue. Taking him to Victor Studios, Berigan was so intoxicated his band members had to hold him up so he could sing and play trumpet. By the end of the song, as Berigan hit high E and finished, the band remained quiet; Astonished by Bergian's technical skill in spite of his drunken stupor, several members of his orchestra paid for cuts of the record to keep for themselves.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can%27t_Get_Started#Bunny_Berigan
At the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, we read:
Why is the Catholic Church involved in the immigration issue? There are several reasons the Catholic Church is involved in the immigration debate. The Old and New Testaments, as well as the encyclicals of the Popes, form the basis for the Church's position. In Gospel of Matthew, Jesus calls upon us to "welcome the stranger,for what you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me. " (Mt. 25-35, 40).
There is a deep mistake being made here, and we should try to understand what it is. The mistake is to confuse the private and public spheres and the different moralities pertaining to each.
The problem of confusing private and public morality is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin, 1968, p. 245):
The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular — be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]
There is a tension between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen. As a philosopher/Christian, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.
A Catholic bishop, therefore, who is pro illegal immigration on the strength of the "welcome the stranger" passage demonstrates a failure to understand the simple point that Arendt underscores.
What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug-smuggler or a human-trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law-breaking. I must be concerned with public order and the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's lawbreaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."
Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops who cannot comprehend the simple distinctions I have tried to set forth.
The acquittal in San Francisco of an illegal alien of all homicide charges throws into unusually sharp relief the difference between the destructive leftists who seek a "fundamental transformation" of the United States and the patriots who defend the country as she was founded to be. Heather MacDonald:
Advocates for illegal immigrants are unrepentant after yesterday’s shocking acquittal on all homicide charges of an illegal-alien confessed killer. The advocates are defending the sanctuary policies that had set in motion the 2015 killing in San Francisco; they have also doubled down on their opposition to any deportation of illegal aliens, criminal or otherwise. If ever there were a clarifying moment regarding what is at stake in the battle for the immigration rule of law, this is it.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was a poster boy not just for the folly of sanctuary policies but also for the mass low-skilled Hispanic immigration that has transformed California. A barely literate drug dealer from Mexico with a second-grade education, no English, and a penchant for criminal aliases, Garcia Zarate had been deported five times by federal immigration authorities following convictions for various crimes.
[. . .]
Donald Trump turned the Steinle case into a powerful rallying cry for immigration enforcement during his presidential run. The illegal-alien lobby, by contrast, denied that San Francisco’s sanctuary policy had anything to do with the killing. California even strengthened its status as an immigration scofflaw after the Steinle homicide. This October, Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54, the California Values Act, which turns the entire state into an immigration-enforcement-free haven for all but the most heinous illegal-alien criminals. (Brown has been assiduously silent on the Garcia Zarate acquittal.) San Francisco imperceptibly tweaked its local sanctuary policy following the killing; today, it would again release Garcia Zarate if asked under the same conditions to hold him for ICE custody.
According to Garcia Zarate’s attorneys and other illegal-alien advocates, the only blame in this case belongs to Donald Trump and anyone who wants to enforce the immigration laws. “From day one, this case was used as a means to foment hate, to foment division and to foment a program of mass deportation,” public defender Francisco Ugarte said. Ugarte manages the immigration unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, where he advises criminal illegal aliens on how to avoid deportation for their crimes. “Nothing about Mr. Garcia Zarate’s ethnicity, nothing about his immigration status, nothing about the fact that he is born in Mexico had any relevance as to what happened on July 1, 2015,” Ugarte said. Actually, the case is almost exclusively about immigration policy; had this country had the ability to protect its borders and deport illegal alien criminals, Garcia Zarate would not have been sunning himself on the Embarcadero on July 1, 2015, but would have been back in Mexico.
There you have it. Which side are you on?
Will you tell me that we need to 'come together,' and 'drop the labels,' and 'find common ground'? There is no common ground here. Either you stand for national sovereignty and the rule of law, or you don't. Either you distinguish between legal and illegal immigration or you don't. Either you stand for the defunding of 'sanctuary' jurisdictions or you don't, leaving aside the denialist lie that there are no such jurisdictions!
By the way, this denialism shows just how corrupt so many on the Left are. Unable to defend the indefensible, they deny that it exists!
A correspondent takes a less-than-sanguine view of what's coming:
At this point I believe that a shooting civil war in this country is inevitable; a government that fails in its first duty to protect its citizens is no longer legitimate, and the Left will not leave except it is forced out.
On second thought, this is a sanguine view in a root sense of the word: bloody. No reasonable person could want full-on civil war and the destruction of civil order. Everyone should calmly reflect on just how horrible that would be. But if it comes to that we will know whom to blame.
I don't expect it to come to that. But I expect increasing violence. The wise hope for the best but prepare for the worst. The prudent are taking precautions and coming to realize that 'lead' is also a precious metal . . . .
UPDATE (12/3)
Hi Bill,
Just read your item on the shocking verdict in SF. I would call it "incomprehensible" – as Steve Sailer points out, the jury had a range of options that should in any rational world have resulted in a homicide finding – but it is all too comprehensible if we see this trial not as a search for truth and justice, but as a skirmish in a rapidly warming "cold civil war".
I noted this passage in your post:
"No reasonable person could want full-on civil war and the destruction of civil order. Everyone should calmly reflect on just how horrible that would be."
I couldn't agree more. There is a terrible eagerness among the younger firebrands of both Left and Right to "cry havoc", and the calm reflection you ask for is very little in evidence. War may come – and when it does we will, as you say, know whom to blame – but when it does it will be awful.
I wrote a post of my own about this almost exactly two years ago; it's here, if you'd be interested.
Best as always,
Malcolm
The tension between life and thought is a very old theme of mine, from the painfully intense youthful days when I read Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolf and all the others. I rehearsed the theme once again the other night in the nocturnal twilight zone between deep sleep and wakefulness. Strange and exasperatingly elusive thought-forms patrol that penumbral region.
Life is one-sided, self-assertive, self-servingly particular, hierarchical and tribal. Life is in every case this bit of life, or that, here and now, limited and conditioned. Thought, however, aims at truth which, if it exists, is by its very nature objective, impersonal, universal, non-perspectival, and not in the service of any particular individual or group. Thought is receptive, not willful, oriented toward what is, open, feminine. And thus in tension with life's will-driven self-assertion. The truth-seeking soul, like the religious soul, is a feminine soul even if masculine will drives its seeking.
My youthful worry was that thought weakens us, making us less fit for animal and social existence. Moral scruples impede action. The potential endlessness of thought opposes the decisiveness of action. He who acts cuts off reflection; he de-cides. Look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. Our spiritual nature, including reason, is anti-life. It is of the endlessness and fluidity of the sea; he who swims in it overmuch is unfitted for life on solid ground and may drown in its depths.
Geist als der Widersacher der Seele, to press a Ludwig Klages title into service. The soul, as the principle of life, is at odds with spirit.
It is a dark vision and it worries me. But is it true? Or just an expression of a certain sort of perverse form of life? If the latter, then it can't be true, given what truth is.
This side of the Great Divide I do not expect any resolution of the tension between life and thought. I don't expect the resolution of any tensions. The philosopher seeks the One and the coincidentia oppositorum. But the living mystical One he craves, the final synthesis that cancels while preserving and preserves while canceling, is an Aufhebung unavailable here below, pace the Swabian genius. Discursive reason to which he is tied vouchsafes him only the abstract One, the Hegelian night in which all cows are black.
This life is a kaleidoscopic confusion of tensions and conflicts on multiple levels from the intra-psychic to the macro-cosmic. It is to me nowadays mostly fascinating and the struggle to untangle it exhilirating. It no longer depresses me. And when rarely it does, death wears the kindly visage of the Great Releaser.
But this too is a contested notion as we shall see when we examine David Benatar's thought on the matter. He does not accept the Epicurean reasoning. Our predicament is a vise in which we are squeezed between life which is bad, and death, which is also bad. The Reaper is grim; he is no Benign Releaser. There is no escape once you are born. Not a pleasant thought. The 'solution' is not to be born.
This side of the Great Divide it's a bloody tangle from every angle.
