. . . your values and attitudes into others. We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.
Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name — can get your irenic ass killed.
"Abortion is health care."
I didn't make that up. It is from a protester's sign.
This from Nancy Pelosi's website (emphasis added):
The Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2010, ensures that all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care and significantly reduces long-term health care costs. This historic legislation, in the league of Social Security and Medicare, will lead to healthier lives, while providing the American people with more liberty to pursue their hopes and dreams.
This is another good example of an Orwellian use of language. Americans love liberty and so Pelosi, in an attempt to deceive, works 'liberty' into her statement, advancing a claim of Orwellian absurdity, namely, that limitations on the liberty of individuals and private entities are in reality enhancements of liberty.
War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Less liberty is more liberty. Dependence on government is self-reliance. Fascist thugs are anti-fascist. The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y.
I had a good session on the black mat this morning from 2:55 to 3:35 ante meridian. When I went to the mat, I was riding high on the wild horse of the mind, and of course enjoying the ride as I always do. But I reined in the beast within five minutes or so and slipped into one of the antechambers of quiescence where thoughts persist but at a slower pace and of a nobler sort. For example, "Who is thinking these thoughts?" "I am thinking these thoughts." "Who am I?" And then the thought arose: to identify the thinker of thoughts is to objectify that which, as the thinker of thoughts, cannot be objectified. Of course, THAT is just another thought: it is the thought of the irreducibly subjective, and thus nonobjectifiable ultimate subject of thinking. Just another bloody thought! And so still at a remove from the Source of thoughts. But then I slipped a little deeper down as these thoughts vanished. Next thing I knew I caught myself falling over. I had fallen asleep. This was about forty minutes into the session. And that brings me to my point.
The trick in meditation is to achieve cessation of all thoughts while remaining fully alert. So you need to do two things: rein in the wild horse of the mind, and then abide in full alertness in the resultant mental quiet.
But this is only the first stage in meditation proper.
Paul Gottfried may have part of the explanation:
Most Jews dislike the Republican Party because they associate it with the idea of a Christian America. And since the 1960s, as Peter Novick exhaustively shows in The Holocaust in American Life, blame for the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews has shifted in both Jewish and non-Jewish accounts from Nazi pagans to white Christians. The Holocaust is now routinely—perhaps most starkly in a book by Daniel Goldhagen—placed at the doorstep of Christian civilization. In my view, this shift is based on reckless generalization and feeds into an unjustified Jewish hostility toward religious Christians. But it’s nonetheless convinced many Jews that even Christians who appear to be effusively philosemitic are really anti-Jewish. Democrats, meanwhile, are supposedly friendlier to Jews because they are cleansing public life of traditional biblical morality, most of which ironically comes from Hebrew Scripture. From 2016 to 2018, while the Trump administration was trying to hammer home that Democrats were unfriendly to Israel and, by implication, to American Jews, Jewish identification with the Democratic Party went from 71 percent to 79 percent.
Related: Paul Gottfried on Propositionalism
An article by Neven Sesardic
Related: Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?
I asked a correspondent what it means when leftists say that race is a social construct. Here is his response with my comments:
What do they even mean? I wonder about that too. What could it mean to say that race is a "social construct"? Do they mean that there are no biological or ancestral differences at all between Whites and Blacks and Orientals? That's just ridiculous — like saying there are no biological differences between human beings and gorillas.
It is indeed ridiculous on the face of it. It's like saying that the difference between fish and mammals is a mere artifact of our conceptual decisions and classificatory activities. It implies that reality has no inherent structure or intelligibility; whatever intelligibility it has it acquires from us. But that is tantamount to saying that there is no reality. It is Kant gone wild: the Critical Philosophy without the Ding an sich and without an invariant categorial framework.
Here is perhaps the deepest metaphysical error of the Left: leftists deny that there is a reality antecedent to our classifications and conceptualizations. (V. I. Lenin was of course an exception.) Everything becomes a social-political construct. How convenient for identity-political totalitarians! The bird of reality can be carved up any way that suits the will to power of some interest group — because there is no bird to carve. Next stop: the Twilight Zone. Rachel Dolezal is black. Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Warren, a.k.a. Fauxcahontas, despite her contribution of a recipe for lobster bisque to Pow Wow Chow, that must-have cook book for the bien pensant, is the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Continuing in the alimentary mode, she is now anent her Presidential pretensions, 'toast.'
I think in most cases they don't mean anything much. They haven't thought about it. It's a smart-sounding phrase they picked up from PBS or from some half-wit university lecturer. It's the kind of thing the bien pensant people say. So they say it too. And they know that, whatever it really means, it must be true and morally right to say it. They know that only Nazis disagree. I've talked to some educated intelligent Leftists who say stuff like this. They usually just retreat to Lewontin's fallacy–more differences within races than between, and all of that. Again, it seems they just don't want to think about it and they use these dumb phrases as a way to avoid thinking. The dumb phrases change once in a while. I guess in earlier decades we'd hear more about how "There is only one race, the human race". But it may be a mistake to expect any clear or coherent meaning behind these propaganda phrases.
That's right. You might think that those who inhabit academe would be critical thinkers; the truth, however, is that many if not most are all-too-ready to succumb to groupthink, whether to advance themselves career-wise, or to fit in and be accepted, or just because they lack the skeptical, scientific spirit.
A. W. F. Edwards on Lewontin's Fallacy
Wikipedia on Lewontin's Fallacy
Neven Sesardic, Race: The Social Destruction of a Biological Concept
