March 2019 – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Alinsky, Tartakower, and Nimzowitsch: “The Threat is Stronger than the Execution”

Kai Frederik Lorentzen writes,

In your latest blog entry you refer to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Being aware that you are a chess player, I want to ask: Do you know that his rule number nine had earlier been formulated by grandmaster Tartakower?

Alinsky: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."

Tartakower: "Die Drohung ist stärker als die Ausführung."

I am well aware of the saying, both in German and in English, but I was under the false impression that it originated with Aron Nimzowitsch, most likely because of the famous 'smoking threat' anecdote. Edward Winter, the chess historian, provides all the details one could ask for, and more:

Page 138 of Schach 2000 Jahre Spiel-Geschichte by R. Finkenzeller, W. Ziehr and E. Bührer (Stuttgart, 1989) ascribed to Tartakower a remark quoted as ‘Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung’. In the English-language edition (London, 1990) that came out lumberingly as ‘A threat is more effective than the actual implementation’, whereas the usual rendering is ‘The threat is stronger than the execution’. Moreover, Nimzowitsch, rather than Tartakower, is customarily named as the coiner of the phrase, with everything tied into the famous ‘smoking threat’ anecdote.

On page 191 of the July 1953 CHESS M. Lipton pointed out two contradictory versions of the story of Nimzowitsch complaining that his opponent was threatening to smoke. On pages 31-32 of Chess for Fun & Chess for Blood (Philadelphia, 1942) Edward Lasker asserted that the incident, involving a cigar, had occurred ‘in an offhand game between Nimzowitsch and Emanuel Lasker in Berlin’ (although there was still, according to Edward Lasker’s account, an umpire to whom Nimzowitsch could protest). On page 128 of The World’s Great Chess Games (New York, 1951) Reuben Fine stated that the scene had been New York, 1927, and that Nimzowitsch complained to the tournament director, Maróczy, when Vidmar ‘absent-mindedly took out his cigarette case’.

New York, 1927 was also given as the venue by Irving Chernev (‘This is the way I heard it back in 1927, when it occurred’) on pages 15-16 of The Bright Side of Chess (Philadelphia, 1948). Nimzowitsch, we are told, complained to the tournament committee that Vidmar looked as if he wanted to smoke a cigar, but Chernev mentioned no remark about the threat being stronger than the execution. [. . .]

"The threat is stronger than the execution" is undoubtedly the best translation of Die Drohung ist stärker als die Ausführung. Winter, however, cites Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung which is not as good in German or in English: "A threat is stronger than an execution."

As for Alinsky, it hadn't occurred to me that he was essentially repeating the Tartakower line. Very interesting, and I thank for pointing that out. We pedants derive inordinate but harmless pleasure from such bagatelles.

I don't know whether Alinsky played chess (many Jews do). I learned about this most famous Tartakowerism when I played the game seriously in my early youth. Not only with teenage peers but also with a grown up team in the third national league (Verbandsliga) where I played at board four (of eight) and had positive overall results in all three seasons. The teenage boy I was enjoyed making grown up men - architects, doctors, lawyers - sweat in their suits … I also liked to play Blitzschach a lot, with five or two minutes time for the whole match. I still have a beautiful English chess clock from the late 1970s but hardly ever play today. Other things became more important, and laymen often tend to avoid former club players. And if it doesn't sound too kulturpessimistisch, I may add that I sometimes have the impression that digitalization killed the poetic spirit of the game. Can Goddess Caissa survive the algorithms?

Chess is Jewish athletics, as the saying goes, and they dominate the game. See Jews in Chess. I would expect that Alinsky had some knowledge of the game. I conjecture that one of the roots of Jew hatred is envy. Jews have made contributions to high culture far out of proportion to their numbers.

If our paths ever cross, Kai, we will have to play. I am a patzer, but on a good day I rise to the level of Grand Patzer. My highest USCF rating was around 1720. So I am a 'B' player. I am 'strong coffee house' at least in the coffee houses around here. I came to serious play (tournaments) too late in life to to get any good. But I beat everyone around here and so people think I'm a master. A big fish in a small pond. I try to explain to them the hierarchical nature of chess and of life herself, but I rarely get through to them. I play a few 3-minute blitz games per day on the Internet Chess Club, the premier site for chess play.

The poetic spirit of the game will never die as long as there are romantics like me around. Caissa, like Philosophia, will ever evade the algorithms.

Chess is a beautiful thing, a gift of the gods, an oasis of sanity in an insane world. If I met Alinsky at the barricades we'd meet as enemies; over the chess board, however, as friends.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartakowerismen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2019/03/liberal-immigration-hyper-hypocrisy.html

‘Liberal’ Immigration Hyper-Hypocrisy

You may remember Trump Labor Secretary nominee Anthony Puzder who came under fire for having employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. But why should 'liberals' care given that they do not distinguish legal from illegal immigrants while standing for open borders and sanctuary jurisdictions in defiance of the rule of law? Suddenly, these destructive leftists care about immigration law? 'Liberals' should praise Puzder for giving the poor woman a job. After all, as they say, no human being is illegal!

What the Left is doing here is employing a Saul Alinsky tactic. The fourth of his Rules for Radicals reads:

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Leftists judge us by rules for which they have nothing but contempt.

The ordinary hypocrite will not practice what he preaches, but at least he preaches, thereby paying lip service to ideals of conduct that he puts forth as binding on all. The Alinksyite leftist is a hyper-hypocrite who preaches ideals of conduct, not to all, but to his enemies, ideals that he has no intention of honoring.

Of course, I am not saying that Puzder did not do wrong in hiring the illegal immigrant. He did, assuming he knew she was illegal.

Is Illegal Immigration a Crime?

It is. Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats have been lying to us. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime.

If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.

So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code.

Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.

On Ceasing to Exist: An Aporetic Tetrad

John F. Kennedy ceased to exist in November of 1963. (Assume no immortality of the soul.) But when a thing ceases to exist, it does not cease to be an object of reference or a subject of predicates. If this were not the case, then it would not be true to say of JFK that he is dead. But it is true, and indeed true now, that JFK is dead. Equivalently, 'dead' is now true of JFK. But this is puzzling: How can a predicate be true of a thing if the thing does not exist? After a thing ceases to exist it is no longer around to support any predicates. What no longer exists, does not still exist: it does not exist.

I am of the metaphilosophical opinion that the canonical form of a philosophical problem is the aporetic polyad. Here is our puzzle rigorously set forth as an aporetic tetrad:

1) Datum: There are predicates that are true of things that no longer exist, e.g., 'dead' and 'famous' and 'fondly remembered' are true of JFK.

2) Veritas sequitur esse: If a predicate is true of an item x, then x exists.

3) Presentism: For any x, x exists iff x is temporally present.

4) The Dead: For any x, if x is dead, then x is temporally non-present.

The limbs of the tetrad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. To solve the tetrad, then, we must reject one of the propositions. It can't be (1) since (1) is a datum. And it can't be (4) since it, on the mortalist assumption, is obviously true. (To avoid the mortalist assumption, change the example to an inanimate object.) Of course, if an animal dies, its corpse typically remains present for a time; but an animal and its corpse are not the same. An animal can die; a corpse cannot die because a corpse was never alive.

One cannot plausibly reject (2) either. To reject (2) is to maintain that a predicate can be true of a thing whether or not the thing exists. This is highly counter-intuitive, to put it mildly. Suppose it is true that Peter smokes. Then 'smokes' is true of Peter. It follows that Peter exists. It seems we should say the same about Kennedy. It is true that Kennedy is dead. So 'dead' is true of Kennedy, whence it follows that Kennedy exists. Of course, he does not exist at present. But if he didn't exist at all, then it could not be true that Kennedy is dead, famous, veridically remembered, and so on. Kennedy must in some sense exist if he is to be the object of successful reference and the subject of true predications.

There remains the Anti-Presentist Solution. Deny (3) by maintaining that it is not only present items that exist. One way of doing this by embracing so-called eternalism, the view that past, present, and future items all exist tenselessly.

But what is it for a temporal item, an item in time, to exist tenselessly? The number 7 and the proposition 7 is prime exist 'outside of time.' They exist timelessly. If the number and the proposition are indeed timeless or atemporal items, then it it makes clear sense to say that 7 tenselessly exists and that 7 is prime both tenseless exists and is tenselessly true. But it is not clear what it could mean to say that an item in time such as JFK exists tenselessly or is tenselessly dead or famous, etc.

The tenseless existence of a temporal item is not timeless existence. Nor is tenseless existence the same as omnitemporal/sempiternal existence: Kennedy does not exist at all times. He existed in time for a short interval of time. So what is it for a temporal item to exist tenselessly? Try this:

X exists tenselessly iff X either existed or exists (present tense) or will exist.

But this doesn't help. The disjunction on the right-hand side of the biconditional, with 'Kennedy' substituted for 'X' is true only because the past-tensed 'Kennedy existed' is true. We still have no idea what it is for a temporal item to exist or have properties tenselessly. Presumably, 'Kennedy exists tenselessly' says more than what the tensed disjunction says. But what is this more?

Interim Conclusion. If we can't find a way to make sense of tenseless existence, then we won't be able to reject (3) and we will be stuck with our quartet of inconsistent plausibilities. More later.

On Suicide

My knowledge of my ignorance regarding the ultimate disposition of things keeps me from viewing suicide as a live option should the going get tough. I lack the complacent assurance of those atheists and mortalists who are quite sure that there is no afterlife. I also lack the complacent assurance of those theists and immortalists who feel sure that God will forgive them. And it seems to me that I have good grounds for both lacks of assurance.

"You may be fooling yourself. It may be that what keeps you from viewing suicide as a live option is your having been brought up to believe that it is a mortal sin. The priests and nuns got hold of your credulousness before you could erect your critical defenses."

To which my reply will be that others, brought up in the same way, went on to commit suicide and to commit without qualm other sins that they were taught were mortal. They were brought up the same way and taught the same things at a time when the Catholic Church was taken seriously as a source of theological and moral authority. Those others were not receptive to the religious teaching. They received it, but they were not receptive to it, and so they did not really receive it. A doctrine can be taught but not the receptivity thereto. Seeds can be sown, but if the soil is inhospitable, nothing will grow.

My innate receptivity to the message that something is ultimately at stake in life and that it matters absolutely how we live does not prove that the message is true. But the innateness of the receptivity to the message shows that it was not a matter of indoctrination but a matter of maieutic.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Burdens, Loads, Weights, and Weltschmerz

Rolling Stones, Beast of Burden

Jackson Browne, The Load Out

The Band, The Weight

Allman Bros., Not My Cross to Bear

ZZ Top, Got Me Under Pressure

Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers. The clue to the meaning of this great song lies in the reference to Jack London's Martin Eden.

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet

Shadows are falling, and I've been here all day
It's too hot to sleep, and time is running away
Feel like my soul has, turned into steel
I've still got the scars, that the sun didn't heal
There's not even room enough, to be anywhere

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

Well, my sense of humanity, has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing, there's been some kind of pain
She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing, what was in her mind
I just don't see why I should even care

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

Well, I've been to London, and I've been to gay Paris
I've followed the river, and I got to the sea
I've been down on the bottom, of a world full of lies
I ain't lookin for nothing, in anyone's eyes
Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

I was born here, and I'll die here, against my will
I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still
Every nerve in my body, is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was, I came here to get away from
Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

BONUS CUT: It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. I've loved this song since I first heard it in '65. I'll let the YouTubers gush for me.

Destructive Leftists Pose an Existential Threat

Peggy Noonan appreciates the threat, but remains a Never-Trumper:

Noonan, who's a NeverTrump, must feel the same way about having to state the obvious from such a superb description of the parallel events. That missing conclusion in her piece is that the only one thing standing between this repulsive neo-Cultural Revolution and us is President Trump, someone she will never be able to bring herself to say good things about. She's a NeverTrump, after all, and her NeverTrumpism signals she's probably still a something of a stylist after status, which is roughly speaking, how Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit argues the NeverTrump crowd rolls.

Yet Trump won because he defends us, the people, and our interests, favoring law and not just law, but the same set of laws for everyone. He couldn't care less about niceties or even being polite to these Cultural Revolutionaries who are out to kill us, because he's not concerned with status or making any such weasels at war with law, history, or civility feel good. He is the status.

This is why we got Trump.

Glenn Reynolds nails it:

And as far as I can tell, although Never-Trumpers talk a lot about morality and principles, their actual beef seems to be a combination of aesthetic dislike of Trump’s messaging style, and resentment that he’s not hiring them, and never will hire them. I suppose a lot of people confuse their own social standing and economic prospects with morality, but color me unpersuaded.

Perhaps in 2016 you could imagine that Trump would be such an awful President that you had a moral duty to oppose him. But in 2019, it’s obvious that that’s not the case. In fact, he’s pretty darn successful. Instead of gay concentration camps, he’s trying to end discrimination against gays worldwide. Instead of being a warmonger he’s now ending wars — and getting grief about it from Never-Trumpers. The Russia-collusion thing was always twaddle, but nobody is even pretending otherwise anymore. And Trump’s background and personal life certainly don’t stand out as compared to many other occupants of the Oval Office whom the establishment deemed entirely acceptable.

John N. Deck’s Contrast Argument against the Philosophy of Being

Here, at MavPhil Strictly Philosophical

Revolutionaries Honoring Revolutionaries

To show honor and respect is a conservative practice. There is therefore something paradoxical about leftists erecting icons to iconoclasts. Or is there? Once in power, revolutionaries become conservative, conservative of their power, their unequal power.

Victor Davis Hanson on Quiet America’s Resilience

Conservatives such as Victor Davis Hanson have a sense of history and are respectful of its lessons. Leftists are a species of retromingent who piss on the past and seek its erasure. That is why they tear down historical monuments. Leftists confuse the world with their utopian fantasy of what they would like it to be. They are deracinated u-topians, Nowhere Men or rather Nowhere Children. The conservative stands on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his hopes and dreams, adjusting the latter by what experience has taught him is in the realm of the possible. The fundamental metaphysical error of contemporary leftists is their denial of objective reality. But this objective reality has a way of biting in the ass the fools who piss on the past. (Am I warming to my theme?)

The Continued Resilience of Quiet America | RealClearPolitics

The Democrat Party in Meltdown

Here:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the unofficial leader of the Democrat Party. AOC is the perfect standard bearer for how the Party is evolving. She has zero real-world experience (beyond making martinis and margaritas). She hasn’t the slightest idea what’s she’s talking about. Her Green New Deal is little more than a utopian hallucination. Nevertheless, she is the most popular Democrat. More than anyone else, she defines the party.

Democrats’ fascination with AOC shows that they place no value on experience, maturity, or judgment. She did not invent chaos, but she embodies it, particularly mental chaos.

Beyond nihilism the Democrat Party is motivated by hate and the negativity. Their decision rule is, “If Donald Trump is for it, we’re against it.” If his goal is to “make America great again,” they’ll do everything they can to prevent that from happening.

They hate Donald Trump first and foremost because he won. They hate him because he is the exact opposite of who they are. He is positive, they are negative. They hate his supporters because they caused him to win.

Read it all.

Democrat Swamp Targets Miss Occasional Cortex

I would have thrown this onto my Facebook page except that I've already loaded it up with eight entries today.

Don Surber:

She is the inevitable result of years of pushing communist indoctrination on middle class progeny. She believes all the goop about climate change, income inequality, open borders, and the superiority of woman and minorities.

Now [that she] in a position of power, they want her dead because her populism makes her the Red Trump, which makes her the bigger threat. They are taking her down.

We shall see. I myself hope the knucklehead remains the face of the Democrat Party. She is more of a threat to them than the pea-brain behind the Botoxed-up face of Nancy Pelosi.

Islam as religion’s most virulent subspecies?

I agree with the gist of Claude Boisson's statement below (via e-mail) who takes minor issue with what he quotes me as saying in the header, turning my declarative into an interrogative. (I haven't checked all his factual statements.) I myself have referred to Islam as a 'hybrid' ideology: it is as much a political ideology as it is a religion. It is a terrible threat to the West and its values, and it speaks volumes about the Left that leftists refuse to see this.

I would rather say that Islam corresponds to an *intersection* between “religion” (as we understand it) and politics, law, etiquette, etc. This is in fact what ulamas have always taught, and they consider this fact as a proof of Islam’s superiority over, in particular, Christianity, a mere religion.

That is why we have the recently revived traditional Arabic phrase “al-dīn wa al-dawla”, the religion and the state. This is what Islam actually is, not a mere dīn.

Hence, for example, the following facts, otherwise uninterpretable:

(1) The Islamic era does not begin with, say, Muhammad’s first revelation in the cave on mount Hira in 610 AD, but with the Hegira in 622, the flight from Mecca (where he was not very successful as a “spiritual” leader) to Medina. There Muhammad, already a prophet, became additionally a social, political and (ruthless) military leader and a lawgiver for the Umma, the community. Islam is thus a Gesamtkunstwerk, not simply what we term a religion.

(2) The Islamic scriptures (the Sunna very considerably more than the Qur’an) are full of “lay” rules which seem very strange to the followers of many other religions: a man should urinate holding his penis with his left hand; Muhammad (the beautiful model that the muslimin should imitate) disliked onions, dogs, salamanders, musical instruments; these are the rules for dividing the spoils in warfare, etc.

(3) I have collected a list of no fewer than 27 mosques in 15 countries, from Morocco to Indonesia, bearing the name of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the most celebrated of the Muslim generals who conquered Hispania starting in 711. There are notably 2 such mosques in Spain(!), one in Gibraltar (the mountain is named after Tariq), 2 in France, 2 in Belgium, 1 in Germany. This is as odd as if one had Christian religious services in the “Cathédrale Bonaparte” (he invaded Egypt) or a Catholic church named after one of the French generals who defeated Muslim armies in the conquest of Algeria in the 19th c., or Italian churches bearing the name of Italian generals who fought in Libya.

Related: More on "No Religious Test"

Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust . . .

"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 ?

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in Erd here stand
is sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 — c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church