Month: January 2018

Trump’s Real Sin? He Speaks Taboo Truths

Why the bipartisan preening outrage over the President's craphole comment? Roger Kimball:

Everyone, near enough, knows that he was telling a home truth. It was outrageous not because he said something crude that was untrue. Quite the contrary: it was outrageous precisely because it was true but intolerable to progressive sensitivities.

In other words, the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things—quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing—about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness.

Andrew Klavan:

Nothing scandalizes a leftist like the truth. Point out that women and men are different, that black Americans commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, that most terrorist acts are committed by Muslims, and the Left leaps to its collective feet in openmouthed shock, like Margaret Dumont after a Groucho Marx wisecrack. This is racism! This is sexism! This is some sort of phobia! I’m shocked, shocked to find facts being spoken in polite company!

No one is really shocked, of course. This is simply a form of bullying. The Left has co-opted our good manners and our good will in order to silence our opposition to their bad policies. The idea is to make it seem impolite and immoral to mention the obvious.

The bullying is highly effective and very dangerous. In England, in the city of Rotherham, at least 1,400 non-Muslim girls, some as young as 11, were brutally raped by Muslim immigrants over a period of years in the 2000s. Police and other officials worked to keep the facts hidden because, according to multiple reports, they were afraid of being called racist. Think about that: police officers did not want to seem racist, so they stood by and let their city’s children be raped.

[ . . .]

Here in the states, the First Amendment has so far allowed old-fashioned American loudmouths to fight the system whenever they could find ways around our monolithic corporate media. But the Empire of Lies is quick to strike back. Google/YouTube now stands charged by multiple accusers of singling out conservative voices for censorship, “fact-checking,” and demonetization. Hidden-camera videos released by Project Veritas this week show Twitter employees conspiring to “shadow ban” conservatives on their system. On campus, intelligent conservative speakers of good will like Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Cristina Hoff-Somers have faced violent protests meant to shut them up.

No person of importance on the right seeks to silence anyone on the left. The Left, on the other hand, is broadly committed to ostracizing, blacklisting, and even criminalizing right-wing speech.

 

[. . .]

Let’s state the obvious. Some countries are shitholes. To claim that this is racist is racist. They are not shitholes because of the color of the populace but because of bad ideas, corrupt governance, false religion, and broken culture. Further, most of the problems in these countries are generated at the top. Plenty of rank-and-file immigrants from such ruined venues ultimately make good Americans—witness those who came from 1840s potato-famine Ireland, a shithole if ever there was one! It takes caution and skill to separate the good from the bad.

For these very reasons, absurd immigration procedures like chain migration, lotteries, and unvetted entries are deeply destructive. They can lead to the sort of poor choices that create a Rotherham. Trump’s suggestions—to vet immigrants for pro-American ideas and skills that will help our country—are smart and reasonable and would clearly make the system better if implemented.

So, when it comes to the Great Shithole Controversy of 2018, my feeling is: I do not care, not even a little. I’m sorry that it takes someone like Trump to break the spell of silence the Left is forever weaving around us. I wish a man like Ronald Reagan would come along and accomplish the same thing with more wit and grace. But that was another culture. History deals the cards it deals; we just play them. Trump is what we’ve got.

For all the bad language, for all the loose talk, I would rather hear a man speak as a man without fear of the Nurse Ratcheds in the press and the academy than have him neutered and gagged by a system of good manners that has been misused as a form of oppression. Better impoliteness than silence. Better crudeness than lies.

We have seen the effect of uncontrolled immigration on Europe. It is very, very bad. The fact is: some countries are shitholes. I don’t want this to become one of them.

Related articles
Trump has his enemies dancing to his tune with 's-hole countries' comments – |

Immigration and the Obstructionist Congressional Crapweasels

Here:

A great deal of the justified anger of the immigration patriot community is that we are told again and again by the media and politicians that we’re not allowed to care that say, the average El Salvadoran immigrant may be three times more likely as the average Norwegian immigrant or four times more likely than the average Indian immigrant to be on welfare, supported by the U.S. taxpayer.

We’re outraged like Donald Trump was when he saw the truly offensive deal conjured up by Senators Graham, Flake and Gardner in conjunction with Democratic leaders that would give mass amnesty (far beyond DACA) in exchange for a pitiful charade of border security. He’s outraged that these senators would betray GOP voters and interests when, even in his weaker moments, he’s always declared (as he tweeted last night) that building a wall, moving to merit-based immigration, and ending the visa lottery and chain migration are mandatory components for the amnesty deal for DACA. The scandal here isn’t Trump’s predictably profane tongue—it’s that Senators Graham, Flake and Gardner would dare to show him this s***hole of an amnesty deal, in blatant defiance of the core issue positions that led the GOP to 100 year-high legislative majorities, and expect him to bless it.

Lindsey, Jeff, and Cory—you’re fired.

Read it all.

‘Diversity’ is Not a Dirty Word

Contrary to what some alt-righties of my acquaintance seem to think, 'diversity' is not a dirty word. To quote from my old entry, Diversity and Divisiveness:

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

The Second Coming 

 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity. 
 
Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 
 
 
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989) 

Word of the Day: Conurbation

"An extended urban area, typically consisting of several towns merging with the suburbs of one or more cities." See here.

You weren't taught Latin in high school? Then you were cheated by 'progressive' idiots. But if you were taught, then you know that the Latin  for 'city' is urbs, urbis. Knowing this, you are in a position reasonably to guess the meaning of our word of the day. And knowing a little Latin, you will be helped in your understanding of 'suburban' and 'urbane' and 'urbicide.' 

Example:

By the mid-1960s, the character of the region was changing rapidly. A carpet of housing subdivisions, shopping malls, parking lots, freeways, and gas stations was being rolled out from LA. Soon the orange groves and bean fields disappeared, and Orange County became one vast undifferentiated conurbation. It was difficult to tell when you left one town and entered another. 

By the way, the author, the philosopher Lee Hardy, is a good writer as witness his "mid-1960s," with no apostrophe. But an apostrophe is needed in the following: 'mid-'60s.' I also invite you to notice that when I am quoting someone I use double quotation marks, but when I am mentioning an expression, or using an expression in an extended sense, I use single quotation marks. I warmly recommend my conventions inasmuch as they are eminently rational. But you are free to disagree without fear of being shot.

Long before I became a Phoenician, I was a Los Angeleno. So I know something about conurbation. Luckily, I live at the far Eastern edge of the Phoenix metropolitan region, right up against the Superstition Wilderness where conubation hereabouts stops, Gott sei dank.

As that great American Henry David Thoreau once said, in the pages of The Atlantic (June 1862) when that magazine was worth reading, in his essay "Walking," 

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Again and again, people who cannot read what is on the page substitute 'wilderness' for 'wildness.' People see what they want to see, or expect to see. Here is an example of double butchery I found recently:

In wilderness is the preservation of Mankind.

(Warren Macdonald, A Test of Will, Greystone Books, 2004, p. 145.) 

Trump Speaks the Truth and Snowflakes Melt

Here:

Is there any question Haiti is a s***hole? Who’s offended by that? If it wasn’t a s***hole it wouldn’t be one of the most prominent recipients of American charity aid on Planet Earth. And it isn’t like this country has ignored Haiti — we’ve been trying to lift it out of s***hole status for more than a century, with absolutely no result whatever. In 1910, President William Howard Taft granted Haiti a large loan in hopes that Haiti could pay off its staggering international debt and therefore achieve a larger measure of independence from Europe. The result? Haiti defaulted and U.S. tax dollars were poured into a bottomless pit.

[. . .]

The open-borders crowd doesn’t want to talk about that, though, and it wants to call you racist if you’re opposed to a deluge of immigrants from the worst places on earth. That’s why Trump’s “s***holes” objection is big news rather than the fact there are so-called political leaders who can’t agree to reorient our immigration policy toward taking people who can successfully assimilate here.

Between the two, the crude man who tells the truth and looks out for his own citizens is preferable to the genteel man who sells us out for cheap labor or ballot-box fuel for a political machine. If Trump is the former, so be it.

Exactly right. The career politician is concerned primarily about his career and the power, perquisites, and pelf it provides. Despite what he says, the typical Republican is not primarily concerned about the welfare of the country.  So he talks and talks, but never gets anything done, as if politics is endless gentlemanly discourse and nothing more.  Well, talk is cheap and it allows the evasion of hard decisions.  

Relevant is the following quotation from Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985: 

According to Donoso Cortés, it was characteristic of bourgeois liberalism not to decide in this battle but to begin a discussion. He straightforwardly defined the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,” una clasa discutidora. It has thus been sentenced. This definition contains the class characteristic of wanting to evade the decision. A class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict. (59)

Trump is rude, crude, devoid of gravitas, self-absorbed, and given to exaggeration. He has orange hair. A statement he once made suggests that he is tolerant of pussy-grabbing. But so what given that he understands and threatens to act upon the following:

1) There is no right to immigrate.

2) Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.

3) There is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and the latter must be severely curtailed if it cannot be stopped entirely.

4) Potential immigrants must share the values of the host country and respect its culture.

5) Potential immigrants must be assimilable and willing to assimilate.

6) With respect to immigration to the USA, preference ought to be given to potential immigrants from Ireland and Norway, say, rather than from Haiti, say.

No Democrat really believes (as opposed to insincerely giving verbal assent to) all or even most of the above, and few Republicans would be willing to act upon these propositions.

This is why Trump is our last chance. If he caves, then it's all over.

Related articles
A Basic Liberal Assumption: Every Political Party is Tolerable

David Benatar on Death and the Challenge of the Epicurean Argument in its Hedonist Form

This is the sixth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are now in Chapter 5. I will need to proceed slowly through this rich and detailed chapter. There is a lot to learn from it. The entry covers pp. 92-101.

Does Death Release Us From the Human Predicament?

Logically prior questions: Is the human condition a predicament? And what does this mean?

Life as predicamentBenatar holds that the human condition is a predicament. I agree. But it depends on what exactly a predicament is. I would define a predicament as an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of solution or amelioration or redemption or salvation or escape. I would add, however, that the solution cannot be easy or trivial, but also not impossible. Thus I do not build insolubility into my definition of 'predicament.' Call mine the weak sense of 'predicament.' This seems at first to accord with Benatar's understanding of the term. He tells us that "Real predicaments . . . are those in which there is no easy solution." (94, emphasis added.) 'No easy solution' conversationally implies that there might be a hard solution.

But he also speaks of 'the intractability of real predicaments, of which the human predicament may well be the paradigmatic example." (94)  If our predicament is intractable, then it is insoluble. I suspect that this is what Benatar really holds. Call this the strong sense of 'predicament.' Accordingly, he holds, not that our predicament is difficult of solution, but that it is insoluble, and thus that a solution is impossible.

If so, then death, which he takes to be total annihilation of the person, is no solution and "only deepens the predicament." (94) This is a curiously counter-intuitive claim. If life is as objectively bad as Benatar says it is, then one might naturally see death not as a Grim Reaper, but as a Benign Releaser. One might think that if life is bad, then death must be at least instrumentally good insofar as it puts an end to suffering.  Benatar's view, however, is that "death is no deliverance from the human predicament, but a further feature of it." (96)

How is that for a deeply pessimistic view? We are caught in an existential vise, squeezed between life which is bad and death which is also bad. Everyone alive will die. While alive we are in a bad way. When dead we are also in a bad way. There is no escape for those who have had the misfortune of being born.  So being born is bad twice over: because life is bad and being dead is as well.

Benatar versus Silenus

Some confuse Benatar's attitude toward death with that of Silenus.

Silenus holds that death is not an evil. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence.  This, the wisdom of Silenus, if wisdom it is, is reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is — to die soon."

Benatar agrees with the first sentence, but not the second. For if dying and being dead are bad, then there is nothing good about dying sooner rather than later.

But Is Death Bad? 

To be precise, the question is whether death is bad for the person who dies. If your child dies, then that is bad for you; the question, however, is whether it is bad for the child. And note that by 'death' we mean the 'state' of being dead, not the process of dying. There is no question but that dying, with its miseries and indignities, is bad for many.  The real question, however, is whether you are in a bad way after you have finished dying.  And to reiterate the obvious, Benatar is a mortalist who assumes that physical death is the annihilation of the person.

The Epicurean Challenge in its Hedonistic Form

Benatar maintains that death does not release us from the objectively bad human predicament  because "death is an evil [a bad thing] and thus part of the human predicament." (110) Death is no escape, but part of the problem. But then he faces the arguments of Epicurus and his followers according to which death is not bad. If Epicurus and Co. are right, then, even if life is objectively bad for all, there is a Way Out, there is a solution to our predicament. The first Epicureasn argument to consider invokes a hedonistic premise.

When I am dead I won't be conscious of anything: I won't sense or feel anything. I won't feel pleasure or pain or be aware of being dead. So how can being dead be bad? This assumes that conscious states alone, or what Benatar calls "feelings," are intrinsically good or bad. The argument, which is close to what the historical Epicurus maintains, is this:

Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states.
Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state. 
Therefore
No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.

The soundness of the argument may be doubted since the hedonistic premise is not self-evident. It implies that nothing  is bad for a person of which he is not aware. Suppose your spouse cheats on you but you never find out.  Intuitively, you have been wronged even if you remain forever in the dark about it and thus never have any negative feelings about it.  Benatar:

It seems that your spouse's dalliances are bad for you even though they do not lead to any bad feelings in you. If that is so, then perhaps death can be bad for the person who dies even though it leads to no bad feelings. (99)

The hedonist might respond by saying that one could become aware of one's spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it but one could not come to feel negatively about being dead. Or the hedonist might just insist on his premise.  But suppose you do become aware of your spouse's infidelity and come to feel negatively about it. Do you have negative feelings because it is bad to be betrayed? Or is it bad to be betrayed because of the negative feelings?

Intuitively, what makes the betrayal bad is not the negative feeling elicited when and if the betrayal is discovered.  The betrayal is intrinsically bad in and of itself.  What justified the bad feelings is the underlying fact of the betrayal which is bad in itself whether or not it causes bad feeling when discovered.

If this is right, then hedonism is not the correct account of good/bad. If so, "negative feelings are not the the only things that are intrinsically bad." (100) And if this is right, then the Epicurean argument in its hedonist form is no refutation of Benatar.  I think we should agree that the argument in its hedonist form is not compelling.

But there are other arguments!  

Related articles
Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part II
David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>
A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous <i>New Criterion</i> Attack

The Walls of Red Wing

A bum knee sent me to the hot tub yesterday afternoon for a long soak.  There I struck up a conversation with a 20-year-old grandson of a neighbor.  He hails from Minnesota like seemingly half of the people I meet here this time of year.  "Which town?," I asked. "Red Wing" was the reply. And then I remembered the old Dylan tune, "The Walls of Red Wing," from his topical/protest period, about a boys' reform school. The kid knew about the correctional facility at Red Wing, and he had heard of Bob Dylan.  But I knew that Dylan could not be a profitable topic of conversation, popular music appreciation being a generational thing.

So we turned to hiking. He wanted to climb The Flatiron but his grandmother said, "not on my watch." The wiry, fit kid could easily have negotiated it. So I recommended Hieroglyphic Canyon and Fremont Saddle, hikes to which his overly protective granny could have no rational objection. 

Music is a generational thing, or at least popular music is. But such pursuits as hiking, backpacking, hunting, and rafting bring the men of different generations together. The old philosopher and the young adventurer came away from their encounter satisfied.

Here is Joan Baez' angel-throated rendition, and here is that of the man himself.  Here I am in Peralta Canyon on the descent from Fremont Saddle:

Peralta Canyon 2

Related articles
Why Prague is the perfect city to rediscover lost youth

Word of the Day: Cack-Handed

British. 1. Left-handed; 2. clumsy, awkward. See here.

Example:

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack,” said the letter published in the newspaper Le Monde.

I'm with Catherine Deneuve and Christina Hoff Sommers on this one.  Real women know how to handle obnoxious men: with a stern warning or a slap across the face.  They don't go crying to their feminist mommies. And real men accept the rebuke.

The Left has lost its collective mind (hive mind?) on this as on so many other issues.  You are one stupid and/or vile leftist if you cannot or will not distinguish among: a bit of old-fashioned gallantry, a risqué  joke, the use of an offensive term such as 'broad,' a pat on the derriere, a Frankenian ass grab, a Weinsteinian manipulation, a full-on Clintonian sexual assault, and rape.

To conflate all of these behaviors under the umbrella 'sexually inappriopriate' shows the typical liberal/left incapacity to draw necessary distinctions as well as an inappropriate use of 'inappropriate.'  

More on Deneuve & Co. at NYT.

Examples of Outfits Not to Join

"Study everything, join nothing."  I am sometimes asked for examples.  Here are some from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary under the entry Regalia. (Borrowed from Gilleland the Erudite):

. . . Knights of Adam; Visionaries of Detectable Bosh; the Ancient Order of Modern Troglodytes; the League of Holy Humbug; the Golden Phalanx of Phalangers; the Genteel Society of Expurgated Hoodlums; the Mystic Alliances of Gorgeous Regalians; Knights and Ladies of the Yellow Dog; the Oriental Order of Sons of the West; the Blatherhood of Insufferable Stuff; Warriors of the Long Bow; Guardians of the Great Horn Spoon; the Band of Brutes; the Impenitent Order of Wife-Beaters; the Sublime Legion of Flamboyant Conspicuants; Worshipers at the Electroplated Shrine; Shining Inaccessibles; Fee-Faw-Fummers of the Inimitable Grip; Jannissaries of the Broad-Blown Peacock; Plumed Increscencies of the Magic Temple; the Grand Cabal of Able-Bodied Sedentarians; Associated Deities of the Butter Trade; the Garden of Galoots; the Affectionate Fraternity of Men Similarly Warted; the Flashing Astonishers; Ladies of Horror; Cooperative Association for Breaking into the Spotlight; Dukes of Eden; Disciples Militant of the Hidden Faith; Knights-Champions of the Domestic Dog; the Holy Gregarians; the Resolute Optimists; the Ancient Sodality of Inhospitable Hogs; Associated Sovereigns of Mendacity; Dukes-Guardian of the Mystic Cess-Pool; the Society for Prevention of Prevalence; Kings of Drink; Polite Federation of Gents-Consequential; the Mysterious Order of the Undecipherable Scroll; Uniformed Rank of Lousy Cats; Monarchs of Worth and Hunger; Sons of the South Star; Prelates of the Tub-and-Sword.

I hereby nominate Hillary Clinton for membership in Associated Sovereigns of Mendacity and Harvey Weinstein for The Ancient Sodality of Inhospitable Hogs.

As for myself, I would not join any club that would have me as a member, to cop a line from Groucho Marx.