Being a leftist means never having to say you're sorry. Did the Left ever apologize for its support of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin? Did they ever admit that the Rosenbergs were, in 'fifties parlance, 'atomic spies' for the Soviet Union? My astute readers are equipped to supply further examples.
The Mueller indictment finds no wrongdoing by Trump or members of his administration:
Despite a 37-page indictment with a long narrative on a coordinated Russian campaign of interference, the most newsworthy fact comes from the carefully placed adjective “unwitting.” It confirms that the special counsel has found no knowing coordination or collusion between these hackers and Trump officials.
Leftists will not admit that they were wrong. What I expect them to do is to change the subject without making any admission that they have changed the subject.
They will shift from the charge that Trump and Co. colluded with the Russians to swing the election in his favor to the entirely different charge that Putin and the boys tried to interfere with the internal politics of the USA.
The attempt by the Left to smear Trump stank from the very beginning. Many of us asked an obvious question at the outset, a question to which no good answer was ever given: Why on earth would Putin want the alpha male Donald Trump in office rather than the feckless Hillary? And given that all the pollsters were predicting that Trump would be crushed, why would Putin think he had any chance of aiding Trump?
Another thing some of us noted right at the beginning was the use of the meaningless phrase, 'hack the election.' You can hack into an e-mail account, but how do you hack an election? It makes no bloody sense unless you inflate the phrase to mean 'influence the election.' But then every political blogger, every commentator, and indeed every voter was attempting to 'hack the election.'
A six-minute video. Peterson makes a very important point starting around 4:10 on the transmutation of Marxism. It is taking a new strategic tack, which no one really envisioned, namely, taking over mid-level bureaucracies everywhere, school boards being one sort of mid-level bureaucracy.
If you voted for Hillary, you aided and abetted this destructive tendency. If you voted for Trump, you did something to thwart it.
The question of how many school shootings have occurred in a given place over a given period of time is an empirical question. But to answer the empirical question, one must first have answered a logically prior question, which is non-empirical. This is the conceptual question as to the definition of 'school shooting.'
What counts as a school shooting? The supervised, safe, Saturday morning on-campus firing of BB guns at targets? The 'discharge' of a pea shooter? The shotgunning of ducks in a pond on a school's grounds? The killing of a stray deer with bow and arrow?
Suppose some punk fires a .223 round at a window of a school in the middle of the night when no one is there from an off-campus position. That could be called a school shooting too. A physical part of the school was shot at.
Or let us say that a distraught person commits suicide by shooting himself while seated in a car parked in a lot of what was formerly a school. This is an a actual case that was cited as a 'school shooting'! See linked article infra. Does this count as a school shooting? Not to someone who is intellectually honest.
Clearly, what most people mean by a school shooting is an attempted mass shooting in a school or on the premises of a school by one or more assailants armed with deadly weapons, a shooting of students or teachers or administrative personnel that causes death or injury.
That definition no doubt needs tweaking, but if we adopt something like it, then, since January 1st we have in these United States more like three, count 'em, three school shootings. Three too many, but even a liberal gun-grabber knows that 3 < 18.
Across the board, lying leftists bandy about terms without explicit definitions, or with over-broad definitions. They do this willfully to further their destructive agendas. If you are a decent human being you will do your bit to oppose them.
Why lie when the facts are easily established and indeed well known? Hillary is famous for this, but Elizabeth Warren, the 'Cherokee' Pinocchio, takes the cake. See also Elizabeth Warren Went Native.
It has been said of Bill Clinton that he'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. Hillary continues the family tradition. One of her latest untruths is that all four of her grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants when only one of them did. She lied, brazenly, about something easily checked. To prolong the arboreal metaphor, why would she perch herself far out on a limb so easily sawn off? Beats me.
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?
The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are ultimately meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.
This is the ninth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017).
We now take up the Lucretian symmetry argument insofar as it bears upon the question whether being dead is bad. That is what Benatar maintains. Being dead is bad for the one who is dead even though to be dead is to be nonexistent. Our predicament is not Silenian. Death does not liberate us from our predicament; it is part of our predicament. Our predicament is an existential vise: we are squeezed between life which is objectively bad for all, no matter how fortunate they are, and death which is also objectively bad for all.
The symmetry argument, roughly, is that if it wasn't bad for us before we were born, then it won't be bad for us after we are dead. But we need to be a bit more precise since it is obvious that we existed before we were born. Each of us had a pre-natal existence, but none of us on naturalist assumptions had a pre-vital existence. So "the argument claims that because our pre-vital nonexistence was not bad, neither is our post-mortem nonexistence." (118) The crucial assumption is that the two periods of nonexistence, the pre-vital and the post-mortem, are axiologically or evaluatively symmetrical.
One way to reject the argument is highly implausible. One accepts the symmetry but claims that because our pre-vital nonexistence was bad for us, so is our post-mortem nonexistence. The other way to reject the argument is by rejecting the symmetry thesis. This is the tack Benatar takes.
His view is that a person's pre-vital nonexistence and post-mortem nonexistence are axiologically asymmetrical, and that only the latter is bad. One might think, however, that if the deprivation argument works for one's post-mortem nonexistence, then it should also work for one's pre-vital nonexistence. According to the deprivation argument, being dead is bad for a dead person because it deprives him of goods he would otherwise have had. Why then doesn't one's pre-vital nonexistence deprive one of goods one would have had had one been alive earlier?
The following example is mine, not Benatar's. Plato knew Socrates. Some of Plato's disciples, however, were too young to have known Socrates. They missed out on the experience of a lifetime. Was it bad for those disciples, in the pre-vital period of their nonexistence, not to have known Socrates?
Benatar makes a plausible case that the answer is in the negative. One argument makes use of Frederik Kaufman's distinction beyween 'thin' and 'thick' persons. I won't discuss this argument. The second argument is that death is bad for the one who dies not merely because it deprives but because it annihilates. Pre-vital nonexistence, however, cannot possibly be the product of annihilation. Correspondingly, while one who exists has an interest in continuing to exist, one who has not yet come into existence has no interest in coming into existence. Therefore, pre-vital and post-mortem nonexistence are axiologically asymmetrical. One who has died and has been annihilated is in a bad way because of his annihilation. But one who has not yet come into existence is not and cannot be a subject of the bad of annihilation.
The Lucretian symmetry argument therefore fails. So while it wasn't bad for us during the pre-vital phase of our nonexistence, this fact has no tendency to show that it will not be bad for us during the post-mortem phase of our nonexistence.
Suppose a white person uses the phrase 'black hole' in the presence of a black person either in its literal cosmological meaning or in some objectively inoffensive metaphorical sense, and the black person takes offense and complains that the phrase is 'racially insensitive.' Actual case here. Compare that with a case in which a white person uses 'nigger' in the presence of a black person.
I have just marked out two ends of a semantic spectrum. 'Black hole' used either literally or in some not-too-loose analogy to the literal meaning — as in 'black hole' used to refer to a windowless office — cannot be taken by any rational person as a racial slur. For 'black' in 'black hole' has nothing to do with race. But 'nigger' used by a white person is a racial slur.
It is worth noting that I did not use 'nigger' in the immediately preceding sentence: I mentioned it. It is a standard distinction and an important one if you value clarity of thought.
How should we explain the difference between 'black hole' and 'nigger'? Here is a suggestion: the latter term is objectively offensive while the former is not: it is merely subjectively offensive. It is offensive only to some inappropriately sensitive and irrational people of minimal linguistic competence to whom no apology is owed and to whom no apology should be given. From this I infer that if I say something that you find offensive, that is not necessarily my fault. In many cases it is your fault. For example, if you do not know the meaning of 'black hole,' then you are either stupid or egregiously ill-informed, which fact is your problem, not mine.
What I have just written is boringly obvious. And yet it must be said in these politically correct times. Even squishy latte-sipping bien-pensant liberals should be able to wrap their pointy heads around it, the point is so simple.
Now for a more interesting case. Some blacks don't want to be called 'blacks.' They want to be called 'African-Americans.' But I find the latter term offensive to my conservative sensibilities, opposed as I am to the hyphenated American. Bang on the hyperlink to see my reasons. Now civility, though a virtue largely invisible to leftists, is prized by conservatives, and I want to be civil. Part of being civil is respecting others' feelings. But truth and reason trump feelings.
Therefore I refuse to call blacks 'African-Americans.' My refusal is principled and has nothing to with 'insensitivity' or racism. If a black person takes offense, then it is his fault and his problem.
Charles C. W. Cooke patiently explains why it isn't and why it is "moronic" for people such as U. S. Senator Brian Schatz to think so.
But are such people stupid and/or uniformed? Now some are stupid and some are uninformed. But a significant number know what they are doing. A better label for them would be 'domestic enemies.'
Leftists have taken over. Some of my Protestant friends are slouching towards Rome. They should read the article to which I have just linked. Swimming the Tiber in its currently polluted state may be inadvisable.
The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.
I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer, a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am. And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature? I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:
I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves. That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them. But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them. Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue. They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline. They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It's true that grace is the free gift of God but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial. I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost. As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything but false mystics. A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.
You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets. The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.
This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)
Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such. But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life.
And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993) Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful title, apt, witty, and pithy!
Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).
Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.
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*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage' and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!"
Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969), p.101:
But the profound discord and hidden infirmity, with which the Stoic doctrine was already infected at its root in classical times, is nowhere revealed so baldly as in its attitude toward death. There is nothing surprising about this. The maxim not to let our hearts be affected and shaken by anything may on occasion be quite worthy of respect; but it must become absurd in the face of an event whose whole importance consists in shaking to the very depths not only the energies of our soul, but our existence itself.
The Stoics teach that there are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president on down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power.
The Stoics had a very important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. In other words, I am allowing these negative thoughts to arise and I have the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the present mental perturbationwas entirely my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused the disturbance to vanish.
In short, the Stoics discerned the mind's god-like power to regulate itself and master, rather than be mastered by, its thoughts. They saw that, within certain limits, we create the quality of our lives. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves blessed. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed — assuming that one is willing to practice, rather than merely read about, the Stoic precepts.
The fundamental Stoic project, in the words of Pierre Hadot, is "the delimitation of our own sphere of liberty as an impregnable islet of autonomy, in the midst of the vast river of events and of Destiny." (The Inner Citadel, p. 83) We can beat a retreat to the inner citadel, the autonomous true self, the soul, the ruling principle (hegemonikon).
As useful as Stoic therapeutics is for everyday life, it is useless as soteriology. It can calm the soul, but not save it. For while the ruling principle has a god-like power to control its attitudes toward the blows of fate, it is not a god. It has no control over its own nature and existence. The Stoics leave us in the lurch in the face of death.
Pieper, then, is right. Death is not an external event that can be kept at mental arm's length and calmly contemplated from an inner 'safe space.' For no human space is safe from death.
I can to a certain extent identify with the hegemonikon or guiding element within me which stands above the fray, observing it. I am that ruling element, that transcendental witness. But I am also this indigent body, this wholly exposed mass of frailties. And try as I might, I cannot dissociate myself from it. The ideal of the Sage who negotiates with perfect equanimity fortune and misfortune alike is unattainable by us. In the end, the precepts and practices of Stoicism are unavailing.
We cannot save ourselves via the path of political activism as many 20th century Communists learned the hard way. But a wholly self-reliant quietism is also a dead-end whether Stoic or Buddhist. We cannot be lamps unto ourselves. If salvation is to be had, it must come from Elsewhere. Nur ein Gott kann uns retten, "Only a God can save us," as Heidegger said in his Spiegel-interview near the end of his life.
You may have noticed that 'day' is ambiguous: it can refer to a 24-hour period or to the non-nocturnal portion of a 24-hour period. The ambiguity spreads to the Latin injunction, Carpe diem! Does it include Carpe noctem! or exclude it? Does one seize the night when one seizes the day?
Or perhaps neither: to seize the day is to make good use of the present, whatever its duration, whether it be an hour, a day, a week. A nychthemeron, from the Greek nyktos (night) and hemera (day) is a period of 24 hours, a night and a day. Sleep researchers distinguish the nychthemeral from the circadian. According to Michael Quinion, "Circadian refers to daily cycles that are driven by an internal body clock, while nychthemeral rhythms are imposed by the external environment."
The use of the word is illustrated in this magnificent sentence from The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God by the great American philosopher, C. S. Peirce: "The dawn and the gloaming most invite one to Musement; but I have found no watch of the nychthemeron that has not its own advantages for the pursuit."
'Gloaming' is another one of those beautiful old poetic words that we conservatives must not allow to fall into desuetude. Use it or lose it. It means twilight.
The title of a recent Weekly Standard article reads:
Professor Uses 'N-Word,' Student Shouts 'F-You,' 'Free Speech' Class Canceled at Princeton.
I would write it like this:
Professor mentions N-word [no inverted commas], Student Shouts 'F-You,' [correct use of inverted commas for quotation], 'Free Speech' Class Cancelled at Princeton [correct use of inverted commas as sneer quotes].
Pedantry aside, the real problem is in the following paragraph:
Last week Prof. Rosen received national attention for using the N-word in this class on freedom of expression. Some students walked out and protested the term’s use. One report, cited in Princeton’s main campus newspaper, says that Rosen asked, “What is worse, a white man punching a black man, or a white man calling a black man a n****r?” And when Rosen was met with disagreement of his use of the N-word, and on his continued use of the term in the academic setting, he said, he would use it, “if I think it’s necessary.”
Rosen didn't use the N-word, he mentioned it. Rosen was talking about the word 'nigger' and asking whether it would be worse for a white man to punch a black man or to apply the word 'nigger' to him. That is a perfectly legitimate question and there is nothing racist about it.
There is also nothing racist about my mentioning of the word in question in the second-to-last sentence. I am talking about the word in the way I would be talking about it were I to say that it is disyllabic and consists of six letters. I am not applying it to anyone.
Which is worse, to punch a Jew (without provocation) or to apply 'kike' to him? Does it make one an anti-Semite to ask this question? Obviously not.
Read the rest to fully savor how the Left has destroyed the universities. If you are thinking of an academic career in a non-STEM field you may want to think twice.
