"Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out." (David Horowitz)
Ever wonder why California has such draconian gun laws?
Month: March 2020
A Limit to Self-Reliance
Among our fellows, and in relation to the government, we ought to be as self-reliant as possible.
But in matters moral and spiritual we ought freely to confess our exigency and ultimate inability to help ourselves. Honesty demands it. To appreciate properly the need for outside help, however, one ought first to try to go it alone. When the self-therapeutics of Buddhism and Stoicism and cognate systems fail, then one will have a concrete motive for the confession of impotence.
The help we need in matters moral and spiritual we cannot provide for ourselves.
Did Sexism Bring Elizabeth Warren Down?
That's what she thinks, but she is fooling herself. Her extremism brought her down. 'Progressive' politics is like a progressive disease: it just gets worse and worse as leftists compete to see who can go farthest Left. But while the leaders of the Democrat Party are sick with the disease and barking mad, most rank-and-file Dems retain their grip on common sense. And so they gave Warren the boot. This despite the great support she received from the distaff contingent.
The over-ambitious 'Cherokee' committed suicide by political correctness. Good riddance! The hyperactive little hustler was a fraud on the personal level who gamed the Affirmative Action system to promote herself, and her ideas were insane: 'free' health care for illegal aliens; inventing new forms of 'racism' including health-care 'racism,' environmental 'racism,' and a couple of others; choosing a trans-gendered child to advise on selection of a Secretary of Education. The last bit of lunacy amounted to political suicide by intersectionality, as Tucker Carlson remarked. If she had exercised some restraint, she, and not the senile Biden, would be going up against Trump, and the Dems would have a shot at beating him.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that funds being used to construct the president’s border wall with Mexico should be redirected to help contain coronavirus, a quickly spreading epidemic with origins in China.
“I’m going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now taking to spend on his racist wall at the southern border and divert it to the coronavirus,” the candidate said during a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening. (Rolling Stone, 27 February 2020)
Leftists have painted themselves into a corner. They think, absurdly, that borders are 'racist.' But even they realize, despite their willful self-enstupidation, that borders are needed for disease control. The solution, however, escapes them: jettison the absurd belief that borders are 'racist.'
They can't see their way out because the race card is all they've got and because of their blind hatred for Donald Trump. What a pathetic bunch of losers!
Pascal Weighs in on the Wuhan Flu
"All of a man's problems derive from his inability to sit quietly alone in his room."
An exaggeration, no doubt, but curiously apropos at the present time.
More on Pascal in my Pascal category.
Thomas Merton wrote a very good book, The Silent Life. Had he been more assiduous in the living of that life he would not have quit his hermitage to attend a theology conference in Bangkok where he met his end by electrocution at the young age of 53.
I will come back to what for Merton and for many of us is the central conflict in the spiritual life, that between contemptus mundi and secular concern.
More on Merton in my Merton category.
Is ‘Wuhan Virus’ Racist?
I'll grant you that it is if you grant me that leftism is a deadly virus and that leftists, 'liberals,' 'progressives,' and members of the Democrat Party in the USA knowingly and willingly carry and transmit it.
Do we have a deal? But if 'Wuhan Virus' is racist, then then so are the following:
- West Nile
- Lyme (named after a town in Connecticut)
- Spanish flu
- German measles
- Norovirus (named after Norwalk, Ohio)
- Middle East Respiratory Syndrome
- St. Louis encephalitis
- Lassa fever (named after a town in Nigeria)
- Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
- Ebola (named after a river in Africa)
- Legionnaires' disease (named after the American Legion)
If the bulleted entries are not racist expressions, then neither is 'Wuhan Virus.'
Class dismissed. Above list found here.
Introverts and ‘Social Distancing’
We introverts need our solitude, and in a world lousy teeming with extroverts, we can easily see the bright side of the 'social distancing' that prudence demands in the face of the Wuhan Flu. It offers us a good excuse to avoid idle talk and social dissipation.
"I really would love to attend the block party and partake of the pot luck, but given my age-related susceptibility and the enormity of the WuFlu threat . . . ."
Related:
Too Shallow a Pond
The world's too shallow a pond to justify one's wanting to make a splash in it.
Grumpy Old Men
Here you have two men with 155 years of combined accumulated wisdom here on planet Earth. Together, they have served in Washington a combined 76 years. And they are squabbling like a couple of schoolchildren about irrelevant nonsense on the playground.
The Democrat Party has come to this? Vote for either of these clowns and you beclown yourself. Sleepy Joe, on the nod, appears to be poised to get the nod. But be prepared for surprises.
The Wages of Frugality
Some of us from modest origins will end up with more money than we will ever need or be able to spend. The wages of our frugality will not be spent by us but passed on to benefit others. We credit our success to the old-time virtues. We understand that poverty is more a lack of virtue than a lack of money.
But to suggest that blacks could profit from these old-school virtues will get us branded as 'racists.' Apparently, to the mind of a leftist, a black who can defer gratification is like a black conservative, a 'traitor' to his race, as if race is a political construct.
Such is the real racism of low expectations fueled by 'progressive' reality denial according to which race is a socio-political construct.
Will Leftists Now Re-Evaluate their Espousal of a “Borderless World”?
We of the Coalition of the Sane understand that one of the many reasons for enforced national borders is to impede the spread of deadly diseases. So I am hoping that such globalist nitwits as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton will learn something from COVID-19. They will perhaps learn the importance of border control. If they do, something good will have come of the Wuhan virus. One can hope. Here's a report on something the illustrious Mr. Kerry said a few years back:
Taking a jab at Donald Trump for promising that Mexico would pay for a wall on the Rio Grande, the secretary [Kerry] enthused over his vision of a borderless world, and hectored those reluctant to join his flight to Utopia. Once offstage, Mr. Kerry ducked into an armored vehicle surrounded by heavily armed guards who shepherded him from one secure place to the next, and then home, where he could relax behind sturdy walls.
In other words, borders and guns for us, but not for you "bitter clingers" (Obama) and "deplorables" (Hillary).
Just remember, folks, political correctness can get you killed. "Killed dead," as a deplorable might say.
Intellectual Integrity and the Appeal to Mystery
Bradley Schneider writes,
. . . while we're on the subject of divine simplicity, I would be interested in your thoughts on the following dilemma. Suppose you are strongly persuaded by philosophical arguments that, if God exists, God must be simple, i.e., some version of DDS must be true. Otherwise, if God were composite, He would not be absolute and therefore would not be God. At the same time, you appreciate the problem of modal collapse. That is, you appreciate that DDS appears to imply modal collapse. Suppose further that you are convinced that modal fatalism cannot be true, i.e,. the world that we inhabit is both ontologically and modally contingent. Question: Can you, with intellectual integrity, believe in or have faith in God's existence in this scenario? It seems to me that you can if you accept the following: (a) DDS is true; (b) DDS does not imply modal collapse; and (c) the reason DDS does not imply modal collapse is a mystery beyond human comprehension.
Is that a reasonable position or an intellectual evasion? Put another way: There are obviously some philosophical assertions that are so demonstrably incoherent or contradictory that one cannot hold them with intellectual integrity, e.g., "There is no truth," "I have no beliefs," etc. Is the belief that [DDS does not imply modal collapse and the reason is a mystery] analogous to such beliefs? When is it reasonable to believe in something that you don't understand?
Well, Bradley, you are asking the right questions. The central question, I take it, is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.
To affirm mysterianism is to affirm that there are mysteries. But what is a mystery?
Mystery-1: A proposition which, if true, is knowable, presently unknown, and interesting to know, but the interest of which evaporates upon being known. For example, the proposition Jimmy Hoffa's body was fed through a wood chipper is, if true, knowable, unknown, interesting to know but such that, if it came to be known, then the question of the final disposition of Hoffa's body would be settled and would no longer be interesting or a mystery. The aim of scientific research is to banish mysteries in this first sense of 'mystery.' Perhaps we could say that this is the Enlightenment Project in a nutshell: to de-mystify the world. The presupposition that guides the project is that nothing is intrinsically mysterious or impervious in principle to being understood; there are no mysteries in reality. Accordingly, all mystery is parasitic upon our ignorance which, in principle, can be overcome.
Mystery-2: A proposition which, if true, cannot by us in this life be known to be true, and cannot even be known by us in this life to be logically-possibly true, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and is of the highest interest to us, but whose interest would in no way be diminished should we come to know it.
An example of mystery-2 is the doctrine of the Trinity as understood by Roman Catholics (but not just by them). The Trinity is an exclusively revealed truth; hence it cannot be known by us by natural means. What's more, it cannot even be known by us to be free of logical contradiction and thus logically possible. Our finite intellects cannot see into its logical possibility let alone into its actual truth. We cannot understand how it is possible. But what is actual is possible whether or not we have the power to understand how it is possible.
(Compare: motion is possible because actual, whether or not the Zenonian arguments to the contrary can be adequately answered. Someone who is convinced by the Zenonian arguments, but who refuses to deny the reality of motion, is a mysterian about the reality of motion. He is saying: Motion must appear to us as logically impossible; yet motion is actual and therefore possible despite our inability to explain how it is possible. This mysterian could easily grant that the irrefutability ofthe Zenonian arguments is excellent evidence of the unreality of motion but still insist that motion is real. He might say: the considerations of our paltry intellects must give way before the massive evidence of the senses: you can see that I am wagging my finger at you now. The evidence of the senses trumps all arguments no matter how compelling they seem. Similarly, the believer in the triune God could say that God's revelation trumps all merely human animadversions.)
So from the fact that the Trinity appears to us in our present state as contradictory, and thus as logically impossible, it does not follow that it is not true. For it could be like this: given our unalterable ('hard-wired') cognitive architecture, certain revealed truths must appear to us as contradictory when the propositions which must so appear are not only in themselves not contradictory, but are also actually true!
The philosophical mysterian is a person who holds that there are mysteries in the second sense. Is Colin McGinn a mysterian in this sense?
McGinn 'takes it on faith' as a teaching of the scientific magisterium that all mental activity is brain activity. He no more questions this than a believing Catholic questions the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, etc. It just seems obvious to him and therefore a thesis that cannot be reasonably questioned. Of course mental activity is brain activity! What the hell else could it be? You think and feel with your brain not with some 'spook in the skull' (my coinage) or "ghost in the machine." (Ryle) There is one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it. And so consciousness, self-consciousness, qualia, intentionality, conscience must all be reducible without remainder to physical processes and states.
But there are powerful arguments which I have rehearsed many times why qualia and object-directed mental states cannot be physical states. Confronted with these arguments, McGinn goes mysterian. He grants their force and then says something like this:
It is incomprehensible to us how consciousness could be a brain process. But it is a brain process. It is just that our unalterable cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to see into this truth. It is true and therefore possibly true even though we cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true due to our cognitive limitations.
As I read McGinn, these limitations are in our human case unalterable. And so I read McGinn as a mysterian in much the same sense that a theological mysterian is a mysterian. What is common to the doctor angelicus and the decidedly less than angelic McGinn is a commitment to the thesis that there are true, non-contradictory propositions that we humans by our very nature are not equipped to understand as either true or non-contradictory. Access denied! We have no access to certain truths because of our cognitive make-up.
This leaves open the possibility for McGinn that there be extraterrestrials who are equipped to grasp mind-brain identity. And it leaves open for Aquinas the possibility that there be angelic intellects who are equipped to grasp and wholly understand Trinity, God-Man identity (the Incarnation) and how Jesus Christ could ascend into heaven soul and body!
But let's return to the doctrine of the Trinity. We are assuming that it is apparently contradictory, and that attempts to relieve the apparent contradictoriness fail. See The Logic of the Trinity Revisited in which I spell out the doctrine, show the (apparent) contradiction, and rebut a couple of quick responses to it. Now consider the following position:
The Trinity doctrine appears contradictory to us (ectypal) intellects, and must so appear in our present state due to cognitive limitations endemic in our sublunary, and presumably fallen, condition. (Sin has noetic consequences.) In reality, however, the doctrine is internally consistent and each of its component propositions is true. It is just that we cannot understand, in our present state, how the doctrine could be true. So, in our present postlapsarian and pre-salvific state, the Trinity must remain a mystery. The claim is not that the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction; there are no true contradictions, pace Graham Priest and his tiny band of dialetheists. The claim is that the Trinity doctrine is true and non-contradictory, but not such as to be understandable as true and non-contradictory by us in this life. On the contrary, it must appear to us as contradictory and false in this life.
Following Dale Tuggy, we may call the position I have just sketched positive mysterianism. In critique of it, Tuggy says this:
Positive mysterianism must leap this hurdle: if this Dogma [Trinity] resolutely appears contradictory, doesn’t that give us a strong reason to think it false? How then, [can] this admission be part of a defense of the rationality of believing in this Dogma?
The admission is that the doctrine appears contradictory to us. But this admission is not part of the defense of the rationality of believing the doctrine. Presumably, only a latter-day Tertullian would defend the rationality of belief in a doctrine on the ground of the doctrine's appearing absurd, i.e., logically contradictory, or actually being absurd. No one will say, "It is rational for me to believe that p precisely because, after careful and protracted consideration, it appears to me that p is or entails a logical contradiction."
The positive mysterian (PM) is not defending the doctrine on the ground that it appears contradictory. The PM is defending the doctrine on the ground that what appears contradictory might not be contradictory. The PM, in other words, is appealing to the possibility that there are certain non-contradictory truths that must appear to us in our present state as contradictory.
Is that possibility one that can be dismissed at the outset? Can one be objectively certain that there cannot be truths that are reasonable to affirm but must appear to us as contradictory?
The PM can grant to Tuggy that, in general, a doctrine's appearing to be contradictory is a strong reason for thinking it false while insisting that the appearance of contradictoriness does not entail the reality of contradictoriness. A strong reason needn't be a rationally compelling reason. Can Tuggy & Co. be objectively certain that the Trinity doctrine is contradictory and necessarily false simply on the basis of its appearing to be such to us in our present state? No, they can't be certain. So there is the possibility that the doctrine is really true despite being apparently contradictory.
'But then couldn't any old crazy doctrine be defended in this way?"
There are philosophers who take the eliminativist line that consciousness is an illusion. This is a crazy view that refutes itself straightaway: nothing is an illusion except to consciousness; hence, the crazy view presupposes the very thing it proposes to eliminate. Well, could one give a mysterian defense of the crazy view? I don't see how. We have direct Cartesian evidence that consciousness exists and cannot be an illusion.
Philosophy is long, but blog is short. So I need to wrap this up. The question is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity. My tentative answer is that one may reasonably affirm positive mysterianism.
Biden’s (Lack Of) Cognitive Fitness: Dems Pull a 180.
An outstanding article by Glenn Greenwald.
But, as the Democratic establishment has united with creepy speed and obedience behind Biden in order to stop the Sanders candidacy, those who now raise these concerns instantly come under a withering assault of insults and attacks from Democratic Party operatives along with their crucial media allies: thinly disguised pro-Biden reporters who continue to insist on wearing the unconvincing and fraudulent costume of neutrality. They are invoking the classic Orwellian formulation from the novel 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fever, Flu, Sickness, Old Age, and Death
Chill out toilet paper hoarders. Pour yourself a sizable shot of tequila and chase it with a Corona. You gotta die some time, WuFlu or no WuFlu. No day without political incorrectness. And no day without cultural appropriation, including the transpecies variety:
Peggy Lee, Fever
The Band, Chest Fever
Johnny Rivers, Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu
Bobby Blue Bland, St. James Infirmary
Bobby Blue Bland, Goin' Down Slow. This ought to be Joe Biden's theme song.
Hank Williams, Lovesick Blues
Dr. Feelgood, Down at the Doctors
Dire Straits, Industrial Disease
Son House, Death Letter Blues
Blind Willie McTell, You Was Born to Die
Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dying
Bob Dylan, Fixin' to Die
Bob Dylan, See that My Grave is Kept Clean. "Did you ever hear that coughin'/coffin sound? Means another poor boy is under ground."
Bob Dylan with Eric Clapton, Not Dark Yet
Bob Dylan, Knockin' on Heaven's Door
“But it’s exponential!”
Peggy Noonan advertises her ignorance in this opening sentence:
This coronavirus is new to our species—it is “novel.” It spreads more easily than the flu—“exponentially,” as we now say—and is estimated to be at least 10 times as lethal.
Why is it "novel"? It is a form of flu, and it is not unique in spreading exponentially.
Noonan seems to think that 'exponentially' is some newfangled buzzword. Not so. It has a precise mathematical meaning, and the Wuhan Flu — to use my preferred politically incorrect moniker — is not unique in spreading geometrically (exponentially) as opposed to arithmetically.
If you have forgotten, or have never learned, the difference between arithmetic and geometric progressions, Dr. Math has a simple and clear explanation for you.
Panicked over the Wuhan Flu (Wu-Flu)?
For perspective, consider that in recent years 30,000 to 40,000 Americans each year have been killed in car crashes, and that thousands and thousands die each year of various strains of influenza the names of which are not bandied-about by the 24/7/366 media. The Maverick advises: resist group-think and mass hysteria. While taking reasonable precautions, live your life and consider what really matters. This is not to say that the COVID-19 virus is not a serious threat. It is, and it is being dealt with by a serious president who gets called a 'racist' and a 'xenophobe' for his eminently sensible travel bans. People such as Joe Biden who hurl these epithets are moral scum and need to be denounced as such.
There are things about which people should be panicked [or at least seriously concerned].
For example, the contempt for America and capitalism taught to a generation of young Americans from elementary school through college is worthy of panic. The extreme levels of economy-collapsing debt we are irresponsibly piling onto the backs of future generations to maintain “entitlements” is worthy of panic.
So is the premature sexualization of children—encouraging them to choose their own gender and taking 5-year-olds to public libraries for “Drag Queen Story Hour.”
But such things hardly register with most Americans.
I feel awful for kids today. They are relentlessly told that global warming poses an “existential threat” to life on earth. They are relentlessly told that President Donald Trump poses an “existential threat to America”—the words used, for example, a few weeks ago by Frank Rich in New York magazine, and used by the “moderate” Michael Bloomberg repeatedly in his speeches.
And now they are told their families had better stock up on toilet paper because only God knows when they will be unable to leave their homes.
It was a Democratic president who told Americans, during World War II no less, that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” He is a liberal idol, in part for saying that.
That is more or less exactly what Trump has been saying. Yet he’s an “existential threat” to our country.
Now chill out and have a beer. May I recommend a