Month: March 2022

Bergoglio and Biden

They are alike in that neither understands the principles, values, and purposes of the organizations of which they are the heads. Given the termitic nature of the dope pope, the following did not surprise me in the least:

Pope Francis is famous for his tendency to shoot from the hip, which is unfortunate for someone whose every word is watched for significant and authoritative pronouncements. His bad habit was on full display Friday; in expressing sympathy with Ukrainians, the pope declared: “There is no such thing as a just war: they do not exist!” In that single sentence, the pontiff swept aside centuries of Catholic teaching and even undercut the ground for the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. All in a day’s work for the Marxist who warns against Marxism.

The RCC in its current degeneracy desperately needs defunding along with every other leftist outfit. I say that as a cradle Catholic with much residual affection for the church of my childhood.

Polylogism and Leftist Racism

Anthony Flood sends us to Charles Burris, Polylogism — The Root of America's Divisiveness, Decline and Destruction.

History is repeating itself before our eyes. The widespread controversy surrounding President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson as a “black woman” recalls the editorial in The Washington Times, “A Judge Too Far,” concerning President Obama’s earlier nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.  The editorial perceptively observed:

“Judge Sotomayor seems to think that inherent racial and sexual differences are not simply quirks of genetics, but make some better than others. Consider her 2002 speech at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said. “I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

“She also accepted as potentially valid the idea that the “different perspectives” of “men and women of color” are due to “basic differences in logic in reasoning” due to “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”

The brilliant Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, regarded as the greatest economist of the 20th Century, discussed this Marxist nonsense in his magnum opus, Human Action, under the category of polylogism. 

This is the bogus idea that the logical structure of the mind is different based on one’s class, race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual preference, etc.

This skewed Marxist concept lies at the root of all “politically correct” notions of cultural relativism and multiculturalism fashionable in academia, the elite media, and critical race and legal theory circles today.

And if President Biden has his way, upon the highest court in the land.

This is more than the widely-accepted idea that our various life experiences shape our world view, or influence our value judgments in making ethical and moral decisions.

Again, polylogism specifically holds that the logical structure of the mind is different based on one’s class, race, nationality, gender, sexual preference, etc. There is no objective reality independent from these fixed determinative factors of causality.

The notion of a Constitutionally-driven independent judicial temperament or impartiality becomes impossible.

The rest is below the fold. 

Did you catch the exchange between Senator Ted Cruz and nominee Jackson? 

"For example, I'm a Hispanic man. Could I decide I was an Asian man — would I have the ability to be an Asian man and challenge Harvard's discrimination because I made that decision?" Cruz added.

Jackson replied that she could not respond to questions based on hypotheticals.

Lord help us.  Yet another indication that leftists are mendacious to the core. 

Continue reading “Polylogism and Leftist Racism”

COMPACT Mag (Not a gun post!)

This new online journal looks really good.  From the 'About' page:

Our editorial choices are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.

I too oppose libertinism and libertarianism.  I note in passing that they in some respects feed each other. See Libertarians and Drug Legalization and Arizona Pot Prop 205 Defeated.

A compact is a political union drawing together different people for a common end. It is neither a contract nor a covenant, neither a market relation nor a religious sodality. It depends not on shared blood, but on shared purpose. We are concerned with advancing this properly political form of solidarity.

I too am opposed to the Blut und Boden mentality of some on the alternative Right. I have come out strongly against tribalism and race-based nationalism while conceding that in the present circumstances a certain amount of pro tempore white tribalism may be necessary to counter our political enemies effectively.  In a war you must do things that you don't want to do and would not have to do in times of peace.

That being said and well understood, I am skeptical of finding "shared purpose" with people from radically different cultures.  What "shared purpose" could we have with sharia-supporting Muslims,  to take but one example?

We believe that the ideology of liberalism is at odds with the virtue of liberality. We oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.

That's strange. The touchstone of classical liberalism is precisely toleration.  I wonder how these boys are using 'liberalism.'

Compact will challenge the overclass that controls government, culture, and capital. Whoever does this is bound to be called radical. We do not shy from the label, but we insist on its proper meaning. Rightly understood, to be radical does not mean going to extremes. It means getting to the root of things.

Very good. 'Radical' is from the Latin radix, meaning root. A radical goes to the root of the matter. But not like the Communists who literally e-rad-icated (uprooted) their class enemies breaking millions of eggs for an impossible omelet. (That's what we call a mixed metaphor, by the way.)

The trick here is to avoid both deracination and a form of autochthony rooted in soil and nourished by blood. We need to find the via media between Bodenlosigkeit and Bodengebundenheit.

One more pun. I have come out against, not masculinity, but toxic masculinity which could be characterized as Blut und Hoden, blood and balls, given the tendency of some on the alt-Right to embrace toxic masculinity in conjunction with an illiberal attachment to the indigenous.

Humanity certainly has its work cut out for it, assuming we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion. 

I stand for free speech against the fascists of both the Left and the Right. And so I wish the COMPACT-ers all the best.

What is the Greatest Threat to Situational Awareness?

The 'smart' phone. Every day I see people rendered deaf, DUMB, and blind  to their surroundings by their phones.  Don't be a dumbass with a smartphone!

Don't even think of packing heat in these days of rampant, Dem-induced, crime until you have thought through the whole business of situational awareness.  Here is a video for you. 

…………………….

A reader familiar with these matters comments:

I agree with almost everything Ken says in this video. You've got to see it coming or your weapons will do you no good. Where I think he goes wrong is when he talks about situational awareness giving you time to decide. No. There is no time in the event for deliberation unless the threat is far away. Then you consider whether to engage or flee. But there is no running away if the threat is a few feet away and coming at you. And no time to decide what to do. You need to react with your weapon by trained reflex. It should actually surprise you how fast you draw and shoot. With practice you can draw and shoot a lot faster than you deliberate. At the gas pump always have your cc in your left hand and your right hand on your weapon. If someone jumps out from behind your car or the pump, bring you gun up across your chest into a close point and shoot. Practice this until it happens very fast, by reflex.
 
Deliberate now how you are going to train yourself to respond to a threatening sit. In the event surprise yourself by how fast you respond.

Kamala Harris on the Passage of Time

We here at Maverick Philosopher are classically liberal in our openness to a variety of points of view on the enduring questions of philosophy.  As long-time readers know, one of our mottoes is Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus. "We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us."* 

In that spirit, we offer the profound thoughts of the Vice President, thoughts that rival in depth those of Aurelius Augustinus and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, and that push the philosophy of time in a new direction and away from the notorious B-theory of time much loved by previous Veeps.

I will leave the reader to decide whether Kamala's insights reach the level of those proffered by President Bill Clinton some years ago when he breathed new life into philosophical logic with his penetrating observation that matters of great moment  often ride on what the meaning of 'is' is. 

___________________

*The motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be  foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form:  Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Our motto is based on this variant.  Horace Jeffery Hodges informs me of a Satanic variant to be found in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." (I am Satan, and nothing human is foreign to me.) 

A Response to Liccione on Border Enforcement

From my Facebook page, 22 March 2019
 
Michael Liccione writes,
 
Totally open borders would be a surrender of sovereignty. Totally closed borders would be inhumane. There must surely be a via media that would be neither. But Washington seems unable to define it, because both Capitol Hill and the White House see more to be gained by political posturing than by working together on finding it. And that, my friends, is the problem–in this area as in so many others.
 
1. Who is for totally closed borders? No conservative of note. Certainly not Trump. Conservatives oppose illegal immigration, but not legal immigration. Nor do they oppose asylum provisions. They oppose the misuse thereof.
 
2. You can't look for a *via media* where there is a false alternative.
 
3. There is no moral equivalence between Capitol Hill and the White House. The House Dems and the the anti-Trump Republicans are pursuing a dangerous and morally irresponsible course. Trump is not posturing. He is doing what must be done under the circumstances.
 
4. Work together? Come on Michael Liccione. I don't mean this personally. I like you and I respect you. But, with all due respect, you are not thinking clearly. You can't work together with a Speaker of the House who incoherently babbles about walls being immoral and her colleagues who wax Orwellian in their advocacy of border security without border barriers. You can't work together with political opponents whose transparent motive is to win demographically by flooding the country with 'undocumented Democrats.'
 
5. One last shot. Some 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam over a 20 year period. Some 70,000 American died of drugs last year alone due in large part to a porous border. Does that concern you? And that is JUST ONE problem with lax border enforcement.
 
……………………….
 
And now, three years later, it is easy to see just how right Trump was on all the issues Biden is wrong on. Biden has proven to be a disaster on all fronts, foreign and domestic.  The United States and the world are incalculably worse off now than they were when Donald J. Trump was president.  In particular, had he been reelected, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.
 
Weakness invites aggression, especially when amalgamated with senility and leftist nonsense.

A Pronoun Puzzle: “He who hesitates is lost”

Grammatically, 'he' is a pronoun. Pronouns have antecedents. What is the antecedent of 'he' in the folk saying supra? It does not have one. 

A Yogi Berra type joke is in the offing. We're hiking. We must go forward; we can't go back. But the path forward is perilous and requires a bold step over an abysmal chasm. I say, "He who hesitates is lost!" My hiking partner, a smartass, replies, "You mean Biden?"

My witticism is modelled on a genuine Yogi Berra joke. You are asked what time it is and you reply, "You mean now?"

'He' in the folk saying is grammatically a pronoun, but it does not function logically as one. How then does it function?

I say it functions as a universal quantifier. Not like a universal quantifier, but as one. Thus:

For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

This strikes me as clear as day. Rather less clear is the role of the first-person singular pronoun in 'I think, therefore I am.'  Does 'I' in this context have an antecedent, and if it does, what or who is the antecedent?   Anythng you say will land you in the aporetic frying pan. Or so I could argue.

Later.

Token, Type, Proposition: Write-Up of Some of Yesterday’s Dialog

I am enjoying the pleasure of a three-day visit  from Dr. Elliot Crozat who drove out yesterday from San Diego.  The following expands upon one of the topics we discussed yesterday.

How many sentences immediately below, two or one?

Snow is white

Snow is white.

Both answers are plausible, and indeed equally plausible; but they can't both be right. There can't be both two sentences and one sentence. The obvious way to solve the problem is by distinguishing between token and type. We say: there are two tokens of the same type. One type, two tokens. That's a good proximate solution but not a good ultimate one. It is a stop-gap solution.

For the solution gives rise to problems of its own. And these may be expected to be as bad as, or worse than, the original one. We made a distinction between sentence-token and sentence-type to avoid contradiction.   But what is a sentence-type and how is it related to its tokens?  You see the tokens above but you do not see the type. The tokens are in space and bear spatial relations to each other and to other things.  The type is not in space. It is obvious that the tokens came into being and will pass out of being. But that is not obviously the case with respect to sentence-types. Such types are arguably a species of platonica. The tokens exist contingently, but this is presumably not the case with respect to  their type. The tokens are temporal items, but it doesn't follow that the type is. If the concrete is the causally active/passive, then the tokens  are concrete whereas the type is not and is therefore abstract in the Quinean though not the traditional sense.   If there are both abstracta and concreta, are both sorts of entity in time? Or only the abstracta?

Now consider:

    Snow is white

    Schnee ist weiss.

Here we have two different sentence-tokens of two different linguistic types.  It is reasonable to maintain that such types are necessarily tied to their respective languages, English and German, in the sense that, were the languages not to exist, then neither would the types exist.  But 'surely' human languages are contingent in their existence. If so, then the linguistic types are contingent in their existence, in contradiction to the strong tendency to view them as platonica, and thus as necessary beings.

Puzzles are erupting like weeds in Spring. I can't hope to catalog them all in one entry. 

But let's throw a couple more into the mix.  The two sentences lately displayed, the one in English, the other in German, express the same proposition or thought (Gedanke in Frege's lingo). Or at least they express the same proposition when assertively uttered or otherwise tokened by a speaker/writer competent in the language in question, a speaker/writer with the appropriate expressive intentions.

We now have token, type, and proposition to understand in their interrelatedness. It is obviously not enough to make distinctions; one must go on to inquire as to how the items distinguished gear into one another, fit together, are 'related.' To avoid this task would be unphilosophical.

One more set of questions. How do we become aware of types and propositions? We see with our eyes the sentence tokens on the page or we hear them with our ears when spoken. But we have no sense-acquaintance with abstracta. Do we 'see' them with the 'eye of the mind'? And how does that 'eye' hook up with the 'eye of the head'?

This ties in with another topic Elliot and I discussed yesterday evening: the difference between the literal and the metaphorical.   Is talk of the 'eye of the mind' and of visio intellectualis metaphorical or is it literal? What does it mean to be literal? Is the literal the same as the physical? And what is the difference between metaphorical talk and analogical talk? Can food literally be healthy? Or is food healthy only metaphorically or figuratively? Some dead meat is good food. But no dead animal or its flesh is healthy. For an animal, being alive is a necessary condition of its being healthy.

Are analogical statements about God literally true?  

 

Real and Merely Apparent Incoherence on the Left: Four Examples

1) Leftists, supposedly 'for women,' champion the right of biological males to compete in female sporting events.

The incoherence here is real and rooted in the conflict between opposing leftist commitments. On the one hand, leftists champion the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the marginalized, even when the latter  bear the lion's share of the responsibility for their condition.  On the other hand, contemporary leftists embrace an absurd social constructivism  according to which racial and sexual differences are social constructs with no basis whatsoever in biological reality.

The incoherence is easily avoided. Leftists need to temper their enthusiasm for the downtrodden, etc. while jettisoning the absurd social constructivism.  They need to show more respect for biological science. Don't they fancy themselves on the side of science?

2) American leftists, much exercised over the COVID-19 pandemic, support draconian measures against citizens while allowing illegal aliens from all lands to flood into the country untested and unvaccinated. If they are convinced that the Chinese virus, so-called because of its origin, is so terrible, why do the leftists who control the current administration permit the incursion of illegals who bring a variety of diseases with them, not to mention Fentanyl which is also a major threat to the health of the populace?

In this example the incoherence is merely apparent. There is no logical conflict  between infringing the liberties and livelihoods of citizens while inviting in and celebrating noncitizens in all their glorious 'diversity'  if one is motivated by globalism and hatred of one's own country. The left is being the left by not allowing a crisis to go to waste.

3) Leftists, supposedly 'for the workers,' allow and indeed encourage an influx of illegal aliens the economic effect of which is to drive down wages for the working-class citizen.

This example is like the immediately preceding one. And again the incoherence is merely apparent. If one is motivated by the desire to destroy one's own country, as she was founded to be, then it makes sense to impoverish the lower and middle class citizens who stand athwart the left's globalist agenda and to support and empower illegal aliens who do not share or even understand American values and  can be expected to enlarge the ruling elite's power base.

4) Pro-lifers who insist that all black lives matter, including pre-natal black lives, are accused by leftists of being white supremacists. 

Here too there is no real conflict between competing leftist commitments. If you see politics as a form of warfare, and want to win at all costs, then you will use every tactic at your disposal including the 'Orwellian smear' to give it a name.