Month: June 2018

ACLU Wavers on Free Speech

Here:

Leadership would probably like the ACLU to remain a pro-First Amendment organization, but they would also like to remain in good standing with their progressive allies. Unfortunately, young progressives are increasingly hostile to free speech, which they view as synonymous with racist hate speech. Speech that impugns marginalized persons is not speech at all, in their view, but violence. This is why a student Black Lives Matter group shut down an ACLU event at the College of William & Mary last year, chanting "liberalism is white supremacy" and "the revolution will not uphold the Constitution." Campus activism is illiberal, and liberal free speech norms conflict with the broad protection of emotional comfort that the young, modern left demands.

I have long viewed the ACLU as a despicable bunch of leftist shysters, though not as bad as the SPLC hate-mongers.

A funny world it is in which conservatives are the new liberals.

Some anti-ACLU posts here.

Seeing Red

If you want to understand the Democrat Party you have to study Communism. Here is a CRB review of three fairly recent books. I have read the first, the Radosh effort. A page-turner! I also recommend Sidney Hook's Out of Step.

A review ofCommies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh andA Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left, by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner andRed Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture, by Michael Barson and Steven Heller

ommies should have appeared long ago but proves well worth the wait. Like Sidney Hook's Out of Step, it is the personal odyssey of an honest mind coping with left-wing illusions and it provides, to boot, a useful directory of key players on the Left. 

A one-time member of the Communist Party USA, Ron Radosh was familiar with many of the Old Left stalwarts, and went to school with a veritable who's-who of the Left: Victor Navasky of The Nation; CPUSA vice-presidential candidate Angela Davis, punctiliously referred to in the media as a "social activist"; Weatherman Kathy Boudin; and the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. 

Radosh is a veteran of Camp Woodland for Children, which he dubs "commie camp." Singer Paul Robeson, a leading apologist for Stalin, performed there. So did Pete Seeger, the banjo Bolshevik himself, later honored by President Bill Clinton. In few other books will one find a recollection of the left-wing anti-comic campaign of the 1950s, or of Birobidzhan, Stalin's bogus homeland for the Jews. Radosh helpfully includes Seeger's lyrics in praise of Birobidzhan. 

Seeger, in fact, was one of the Communist Party's "artists in uniform," who believed that "songs are weapons." Seeger was a hero to Radosh, but that does not stop him from recalling Seeger's slavish defense of Stalin. Radosh reminds us that Seeger's Songs for John Doe, an album he made with the Almanac Singers during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, was swiftly recalled when the Party line changed from "peace" to outright jingoism.

Radosh learned his boyhood lessons well. He became part of the left-wing vanguard at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a movement whose veterans are still making trouble. They include Tom Hayden, who proclaimed that anti-Communism was "the moral equivalent of rape," and Los Angeles Times columnist Bob Scheer, who breathlessly told Radosh in a radio interview that utopia had been realized in North Korea. Bob Cohen, another of Radosh's comrades, candidly confessed that "we don't want peace in Korea, we want the North Koreans to win." In similar style, television producer Danny Schechter wore a tee-shirt proclaiming, "We won in Vietnam and Cambodia."

Radosh's withdrawal from these ranks began with one of the defining events of his life, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953. It was an article of faith on the Left that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of a reactionary, xenophobic, anti-Semitic America. Nearly two decades later, Radosh set out to make the definitive case in the Rosenberg's favor, but wound up convinced of their guilt. The Rosenberg File, written with Joyce Milton, proves beyond doubt that Julius Rosenberg was a Stalinist spy and that Ethel was his accomplice. 

The Left quickly denounced Radosh as a heretic. Leading the charge was Marxist historian Eric Foner of Columbia University. But the response of Michael Harrington, America's leading socialist, also proved revealing. "I always knew they were guilty," he said, "but we're trying to get former Communists who have left the party but are still pro-Soviet into our organization, and I can't do anything to alienate them." The same kind of doublethink prompted Communist Party executive Dorothy Healey to tell Radosh how the Soviet Union generously funded the CPUSA — "How do you think the CP bought its building on West 23rd Street?" — and then threaten to sue when he repeated the exchange in a review of her book.

Exposing the Rosenberg's guilt was not politically correct, and the Left never forgave Radosh, who was willing to follow the truth wherever it led. "The reaction to The Rosenberg File, made me finally move on to consider the ultimate heresy: perhaps the Left was wrong not just about the Rosenberg case, but about most everything else." The present book, which contains some funny vignettes about Bob Dylan and Bianca Jagger, confirms that the Left has always been a kind of hate group. "Today's Left has no Soviet Union as a beacon," Radosh notes, "but its reflexive hatred of the American system is intact." 

Related: Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness 

 

Child Abuse and ‘Cages’ at the Southern Border?

Jacques writes,

Welcome back to the internet, for better or worse.  I have to ask:  Do you know if there's anything to the current hysteria over the illegal immigrants' kids being held in 'cages'?  I've seen pictures that appear to confirm this and, while I have no problem with illegals being detained or deported, or even separated from their parents if that's really necessary, this does seem wrong to me.  Based on long experience with the MSM and the left, I'm assuming there is _probably_ some reasonable explanation for the pictures that are making the rounds.  But do you know anything?  For some reason there is nothing much about this on the usual immigration sanity sites like vdare.  And I assume they would have posted something to clarify or correct the propaganda if they knew anything about it.  I'm a bit puzzled and concerned.  I want the invasion to stop, but I don't see why that couldn't be done humanely. 

As far as I can tell, the leftist propaganda on this issue is just that. Truth is not a leftist value. Leftists  are out for power any way they can get it. So one must expect lies and distortions from their camp. The strategy of the Democrat Party is to win demographically by obstructing effective attempts to control the borders and stem the tide of illegals on the reasonable expectation that the vast majority of illegals will support the Democrat Party.  That is the Grand Strategy. Trump was elected to oppose it. Because he alone among Republicans has the civil courage to tackle the issue head-on, he is mindlessly despised both by the destructive Left and the Never-Trumper Right.

Again we see that for the Left, the issue is not the issue.  Although individual lefties may care about the plight of immigrant children, leftists in general do not.  They use the children issue to advance their agenda which is to subvert the rule of law, gut the U. S. Constitution, and advance on all fronts toward their goals.

The following videos credibly rebut the 'caging' and 'child abuse' charge:  here and here.

Tell me what you think.

The Club Sandwich: Choice of White Supremacists

Nothing is so stupid that some liberal won't maintain it:

This week, the [Boston] Globe carried a letter alleging that the club sandwich is ‘rooted in white male privilege’, and that Furst’s encomium proved ‘the power of the patriarchal establishment in the United States’. The author, Anastasia Nicolaou, holds a master of liberal arts in gastronomy from Boston University, with a side order of Professional Certification in Cheese Studies. You can’t argue with an expert.

Quatschkopf!

‘Progressive’ Hate, ‘Progressive’ Projection

The Bad Hate the Good: The Southern Poverty Law Center vs. Prager University:

The SPLC smears individuals and groups it differs with by labeling them as some form of "hater": "racist," "white supremacist," "extremist" and the like. That it is cited and even relied upon by The New York Times, Facebook, Amazon, Google, CNN and others, and that Apple gave the organization a million dollars, is testimony to the moral state of mainstream media and corporate culture in America today.

[. . .]

Any organization that labels Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the extraordinary Somali-American woman who devotes her life to fighting for oppressed women, especially in the Islamic world — an "extremist," as the SPLC has done, is not a moral organization. No wonder it just agreed to pay Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz $3.4 million and issued a retraction for smearing him as an "anti-Muslim extremist."

This kind of behavior should surprise no one. Since Stalin labeled Trotsky, the ideological leader of Soviet communism, a "fascist," the left (not liberals, to whom the left is as opposed as it is conservatives) has libeled its opponents. Without lying about its opponents, there would be no left.

Read it all.

For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue

David Horowitz (2013):

Here is another statement from [Saul Alinsky's] Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party.

In 1996 Senator Bob Dole — a moderate Republican and deal-maker — ran for president against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. At the time, Dick Morris was Clinton’s political adviser. As they were heading into the election campaign, Clinton — a centrist Democrat — told Morris, “You have to understand, Dick, Bob Dole is evil.” That is how even centrist Democrats view the political battle.

Because Democrats and progressives regard politics as a battle of good versus evil, their focus is not on policies that work and ideas that make sense, but on what will make their party win. Demonizing the opposition is one answer; unity is another. If we are divided, we will fail, and that means evil will triumph. (emphasis added)

A good recent example of how, for the Left, the issue is never the issue is the furor over the separation of the children of illegal immigrants from their parents.  Why are 'liberals' apoplectically concerned about the separation of the children of criminals from their parents? Because the issue is not the issue. That is, the issue is merely a means to the end of more power. They have no objection to the use of State power in separating children from criminal parents when the ones affected are citizens.

Separation

This meme bears the title 'Hypocrisy.' But it is worse than hypocrisy. And it is not correctly called a double standard. Leftists, liberals, progressives — whatever you want to call them — don't share our values and standards. They use them against us in the approved Alinskyite manner.  

Dallas Willard, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge

Dear Dr. Vallicella,

Knowing your appreciation for the work of the late philosopher Dallas Willard, I thought I would draw your attention to his posthumously published work, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge. There is an excerpt consisting of the foreword (by Scott Soames), editor's introduction, preface, and chapter 1 available for free at the Taylor and Francis site here.
 
The book itself is priced for the independently wealthy and university libraries, and there are no used versions available on the market yet.
 
With continuing appreciation for your writings on philosophy,
 
Gary Hartenburg
 

Presentism, Truthmakers, and Ex-Concrete Objects: Some Questions for Francesco Orilia

 Here is an interesting little antilogism to break our heads against:

A. Presentism: Only what exists at present, exists.

B. Datum: There are past-tensed truths.

C. Truthmaker Principle: If p is a contingent truth, then there is a truthmaker T such that (i) T makes true p, and (ii) T exists when p is true.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they cannot all be true.  Any two of  the propositions, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one. 

For example, it is true, and true now, that Kerouac wrote On the Road. This truth is both past-tensed and contingent.  So, by (C),  this truth has a truthmaker that now exists. A plausible truthmaker such as the fact of Kerouac's having written On the Road  will have to have Kerouac himself as a constituent. But Kerouac does not now exist, and if presentism is true, he does not exist at all.  Assuming that a truthmaking fact or state of affairs cannot exist unless all its constituents exist, it follows that there is no present truthmaker of the past-tensed truth in question.  So if (C) is true, then (A) is false: it cannot be the case that only what exists now, exists.  I will assume for the space of this entry that (B) cannot be reasonably denied.

So one way to solve the antilogism is by rejecting presentism. Presentists will be loathe to do this, of course, and will try to find surrogate items to serve as constituents of present truthmakers.

Different sorts of surrogate items have been proposed. I will consider the surrogate or proxy favored by Francesco Orilia in his rich and penetrating "Moderate Presentism," Philosophical Studies, March 2016. (He would not call it a surrogate or a proxy, but that is what I think it is.)

Orilia's favored surrogates are ex-concrete objects. Consider the sentence

1) Garibaldi was awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a.m.

This sentence is past-tensed, and if true, then contingently true. So, if true, it needs a truthmaker. We are told that the truthmaker of (1) is the present event  or state of affairs — Orilia uses these terms interchangeably, see p. 598, n. 1) – – consisting of Garibaldi's exemplifying of the time-indexed past-tense property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m.  But of course Orilia does not mean that concrete Garibaldi himself presently exemplifies the property in question; he means that the ex-concrete object Garibaldi presently exemplifies it.  After all, concrete Garibaldi is long gone.

What is an ex-concrete object?

The emperor Trajan is a merely past object (particular). On typical (as opposed to moderate) presentism, his being past implies that he does not exist at all. For Orilia, however, "merely past objects have not really ceased to exist, but have rather become ex-concrete." (593) The idea seems to be that they continue to exist, but with an altered categorial status. Merely past objects were concrete  but are now ex-concrete, where this means that they are "neither abstract nor concrete." (593, quotation from T. Williamson.)

So when Trajan became wholly past, he yet continued to exist as an ex-concrete object. Hence Trajan still exists — as an ex-concrete object.  And the same goes for Garibaldi. Since the statesman still exists as ex-concrete he is available now to exemplify such properties as the property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a.m. His exemplification of this property constitutes a present event or state of affairs that can serve as the truthmaker for (1).

Can an item change its categorial status?

Orilia is well aware that there is something dubious about the supposition that an item can change or lose its categorial status. For it seems as clear as anything that categorial features are essentially had by the items that have them. Numbers, sets, and (Fregean) propositions are candidate abstracta. There is little or no sense to the notion that the number 9, say, could become concrete or ex-abstract. For the number 9, if abstract, is abstract in every possible world, assuming, plausibly, that numbers are necessary beings. Similarly, it is difficult to understand how a  statue, say, if destroyed could could continue to exist as an ex-concrete object. It is not even clear what this means.

Pushing further

Orilia tells us that "backward singular terms should be taken at face value as referring to the very same objects they used to refer [to] when they were not, so to speak, backward." (593, emphasis added.)   So uses of 'Garibaldi' now refer to the very same object that uses of the name refereed to when Garibaldi was alive. But now the referent is an ex-concrete object whereas then it was a concrete object. So I ask: how can concrete Garibaldi be the same as ex-concrete Garibaldi when they differ property-wise? I now invoke the contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. 

If x, y differ property-wise, then they differ numerically; concrete Garibaldi and ex-concrete Garibaldi differ property-wise in that the former but not the latter is concrete; ergo, they cannot be numerically the same (one and the same).  If so, then the temporally forward and backward uses of singular terms such as "Garibaldi' cannot refer to the same object, contra what Orilia says.

Orilia will readily grant me that an haecceity of a wholly past concrete object, assuming there are haecceities,  is a presently existing surrogate of the individual. My question to him is: why is this not also the case for ex-concrete objects? Of course, they are not haecceities. But they too 'go proxy' in the present for past objects such as Garibaldi and Leopardi, and they too are  distinct from full-fledged concrete objects.

It seems to me that Orilia's position embodies a certain tension.  His moderate presentism denies that there are past events or states of affairs, in line with standard or typical presentism, but allows that there are past objects (589).  But these past objects are ex-concrete. The latter, then, are not past objects strictly speaking (as they would be on a B-theory) but proxies for past objects. So there may be some waffling here. Connected with this is the fact that it is not clear how concrete Garibaldi, say, relates to ex-concrete Garibaldi. We are told in effect that they are the same, but they cannot be the same. Their relation wants clarification.

Are ex-concrete objects subject to the 'aboutness worry'?

If I am sad that my classmate Janet Johnston has died and is no longer with us, presumably it is the loss of Janet herself that saddens me. There is no comfort in the thought that ex-concrete Janet is still 'with us,' any more than there would be at the thought that her haecceity, now unexemplified, is still 'with us.'

Truthmaking troubles

Yesterday I drank some Campari. What makes this past-tensed, contingent truth true?  Note the difference between:

2) BV's having yesterday drunk Campari (A case of a present object's past exemplification of an untensed property) 

and

3) BV's being such that he drank Campari yesterday (A case of a present object's present exemplification of a past-tensed property.)

(2) is a past event or state of affairs, while (3) is a present event or state of affairs. Since Orilia's moderate presentism rejects past (and future) events, he must take (3) to be the truthmaker of the truth that yesterday I drank some Campari. But it seems to me that the truthmaker of 'Yesterday I drank some Campari' is not (3), but (2).  This sentence is true because yesterday I exemplified the untensed property of drinking Campari, not because today I exemplify the past-tensed property of having drunk Campari yesterday. Why? Well, I can have the past-tensed property today only because I had the untensed property yesterday.  The latter is parasitic upon the former. 

The same problem arises for Orilia's sentence (1). We are told that the truthmaker of (1) is the present event  or state of affairs consisting of Garibaldi's exemplifying of the time-indexed past-tense property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m. Ex-concrete Garibaldi cannot now have the time-indexed past tense property unless concrete Garibaldi had the untensed property of being awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m. Or so it seems to me.

To conclude, I am not convinced that Orilia (the man in the middle, below) has provided us with truthmakers for past-tensed truths.

Image credit: Francesca Muccini, 5 June 2018, Recanati, Italy.  The philosopher to the left of Francesco is Mark Anderson, Francesca's husband.

IMG_0883 (3)
 

The Mid-Life Crisis and the Happiness Curve: Life is Better After Fifty

Here:

The mid-life crisis is a cliché: balding, paunchy man in red sports car, frantically trying to convince himself that women still find him attractive. Implicit in the word “crisis” is a sudden change. You wake up some day in your forties to realize that you are no longer young. The resulting angst—it’s all straight downhill to death from here—nudges people to do crazy things.

The truth is more complex, writes Jonathan Rauch in his new book, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50. Across cultures and demographics, people’s life satisfaction declines in their forties. It is rarely a crisis, though; it’s more of a malaise. But then a funny thing happens around age 50. Mood bottoms out and begins to climb. Indeed, people in their sixties and seventies report themselves as being far happier than they ever imagined they’d be. 

This has been my experience almost exactly. My mid-life 'crisis' — the going term but not particularly happy, pun intended –  began when I was 41 and was in full flood for five years. But then at age 49 I entered into the happiest period of my life, a period still going strong as I approach 68 and a half.

Related: A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis, wherein I cite an excellent essay by Kieran Setiya and tell my story.

Politics and Philosophy

Politics is a practical game. One has to win to be effective. Merely to have the better set of ideas and policies is to fail. Philosophy, however, is not about winning. It is about ultimate understanding, spiritual self-transformation, and wisdom. A politics fully informed by insight and understanding would be ideal if it were not impossible. This 'ideal,' however is not an ideal for us. Nothing counts as an ideal for us if it is unattainable by us.

Ars longa, vita brevis. The same is true of philosophy. The philosopher has time and takes his time. Hear Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80: Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!" "This is how philosophers should greet each other: Take your time!"

The philosopher can resist the urge for a quick solution. He takes his time because he is a "spectator of all time." (Plato, Republic, Book VI) He's in the game for the long haul, for the 'duration.' After his death he is still in the game if his Nachlass is found worthy. He may concern himself with the questions of the day, but he never loses sight of the issues of the ages. And he has an eye for the presence of the latter within the former.

In politics we have enemies; political discourse is inherently polemical. But there are no enemies in philosophy. For if your interlocutor is not a friend, then you are not philosophizing with him. Ideally, philosophy is the erothetic love of truth pursued either in solitude or  among friends who love the truth more than they love each other.

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. (Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1096a15; but the thought is already in Plato at Republic, Book X, 595b-c and 607c. I am tempted to say that everything is already in Plato . . . .) 

Adams John

Wolff on Anti-Natalism: A Glimpse into the Mind of a Leftist Activist

In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism:

I have to confess that blogging is weird.  It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn.  Anti-natalism?  Seriously?  With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that is American politics, with the signs, at long last, of a grassroots progressive surge, we are talking about anti-natalism?

Look, far be it from me to stifle discussion.  When you are done, I will go on talking about the world.

From this outburst one can see that for the leftist activist, the political is everything.  One is not talking about the world if one is talking about the value of life and the morality of procreation. For the Stoned Philosopher, questions about life and death, meaning and value, God and the soul, pale into insignificance in comparison to the political squabbles of the day.

Our sane, conservative appreciation that the political is a limited sphere leaves us at a political disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere. 

I call this The Conservative Disadvantage.

Leftists as Politically Retromingent

A retromingent is an animal that urinates backwards.

Posturing as 'progressive,' the leftist pisses on the past, seeking to erase its memory by destroying monuments and redacting the historical record.  There is no piety in the leftist, no reverence. Try using those words at a Manhattan or Georgetown cocktail party and see what happens.

This political retromingency helps explain the leftists' lack of respect for language.

Related: On Reverence