Month: February 2023

To Those Fleeing California

DO NOT come to Arizona! It's just too damned hot here for you snowflakes. And on top of that everybody is packing heat. That's why you don't hear any honking on the highways and byways. "An armed society is a polite society."

Arizona dry heatWe are racist to the core in this rattlesnake-infested inferno which is also home to the scorpion, the Gila monster, and other venomous critters no librul would want to tangle with. There is nothing here but hot sand and dirt lightly covered with some dessicated but still prickly-as-hell vegetation such as cat claw.

Everything here either sticks, stings, or stinks.  Go elsewhere! Oregon and Idaho would love to have you.  Or better yet: wallow in the shit you shat. Enjoy the sanctuary that your sanctimonious silliness has built. Receive the wages of wokery.

 

 

California lost a Congressional seat due to mass exodus. Excellent! Geographically beautiful, California is now a political craphole to rival the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. I say that as a native Californian who lived for most of the '70s in Boston.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weights and Measures

The Band, The Weight

The Byrds, Eight Miles High

The Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile

The Who, I Can See for Miles

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away.  So titled because it is In 7/4 time.

Dave Brubeck, Take Five.  So titled because it is in 5/4 time.

Cream, Spoonful.  Heavy, man.

The Lovin' Spoonful, Six O'Clock

Gene Pitney, 24 Hours from Tulsa

Beach Boys, 409. With a four-speed manual tranny, dual quad carburetors (before fuel injection), positraction (limited slip differential), and 409 cubic inches of engine displacement.  Gas was cheap in those days.

Junior Brown Redneck Version with a little help from the Beach Boys

ZZ Top and Jeff Beck, 16 Tons.  Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1955 #1 version.

Justin Timberlake, et al., 500 Miles. (From Inside Llewyn Davis)

Bobby Bare, 500 Miles Away From Home

Lovin' Spoonful, Full Measure.  Undeservedly obscure.

David French Update

By Rod Dreher.  My Substack take on French is entitled David French, Christianity, and Politics.

Filed under: Useful Idiocy and Idiots

Dreher readers on French. An insightful excerpt by one such reader. It earns the rarely-awarded MavPhil plenary endorsement:

French, like most of the people who inhabit social conservative ghettos within neoconservatism, still thinks it is basically the 2000s. He acts as though the events of 2008 — the year of the financial crash — and everything that has occurred since then never really happened, and that if Americans knew what was good for them, they would have longed for a third Bush term, or a McCain administration. To the extent that they will even acknowledge the Great Awokening as a problem, they assume they can weather it the same way that they did the radicalism of the 1960s. These people have not processed or internalized that the key institutions of Big Business and the security state are now on the side of the Woke. It's not so much that the woke have conquered these institutions definitively, but rather that they have made those who run these institutions understand who takes scalps and who doesn't — meaning that the Woke militants have made sure that the leadership class within American institutions knows what's going to happen to them if they don't comply. If the GOP isn't ready to start taking a few of their own like DeSantis has been willing to do with Disney, then social conservatives had best withdraw altogether from public life and try to insulate themselves from the next great purge.

Think about it: J.K. Rowling, Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Elon Musk are all circa 2008 liberals who if anything are further to the left than French. But the moment they dissented on any issue they were turned into Enemies Of The People. And unless you have the kind of money that Musk and Rowling do, they have little to no recourse to fight back going through the motions and mechanisms that French believes in.

What to do? The alternative is for French to acknowledge that for all of his laudable legal efforts, he was completely incapable of preventing the Left from dominating every facet of modern life, and definitively winning the culture war to the point where the only debate is now the fate of the vanquished. And to do that he has to admit that the legal strategy he has dedicated his entire life to has failed. That's a high bar to ask anyone to clear.

……………………

Bro Inky writes,

"An insightful excerpt by one such reader. It earns the rarely-awarded MavPhil plenary endorsement:"
 
Thanks!  And thanks, One Such Reader! I would like to forward this to many, in many places.
What do you recommend as attribution?  This is EXCELLENT. So well composed AND written.
 
The identity of the writer is not supplied by Dreher.  So, for purposes of attribution, cite the post in question and say something like, 'this is an excerpt from one of the responses that Dreher received.' It was at the bottom of the list of responses, but it might not be at the bottom now. You can check that for yourself.
 

Running as Equalizer?

Top o' the Stack.

………………………

Malcolm Pollack comments:

I liked your brief post on running-as-equalizer, and how stubbornly our natural inequalities will always dash our hope of sweeping them under the rug. ("Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.")
 
There's even another natural inequality you didn't touch on, namely the difference between those who have the fiber to get off their asses to go running in the first place, and those who won't – between those who do, and don't, have the will and wisdom to suffer consciously to improve their future selves. 
That, in my (insufficiently) humble opinion, is likely the most important inequality of all.
 
A stimulating comment. Now for some commentary on the comment.
 
A. Life is hierarchical by any measure in all dimensions including physical, mental, moral, and spiritual.  We are not equal as individuals. And the same goes for groups. The 'woke' attempt to enforce 'equity' is bound to fail.  There will never be equality of outcome.  Merit will inevitably find a way of asserting itself.  In the short term, the institutionalized assault on merit will be disastrous for the vast majority while profiting the oligarchic enforcers of 'equity.' In the long term, the enforcers too will suffer. For as Malcolm, points out, "reality doesn't go away." 
 
Not only is the attempt to enforce 'equity' bound to fail, it cannot count as a value in any sound value hierarchy. For 'equity' is unjust.
 
Note also that the enforcement of 'equity' is selective: Is there 'equity' in professional sports? For that matter, are professional sports the home of  'diversity' and 'inclusion'? The questions answer themselves.  In the NBA and the NFL qualifications matter.  Real qualifications, not 'woke qualifications.'  No DEI there! Examples of  'woke qualifications' include being black, being female, and being lesbian as in the case of the current presidential press secretary. The point is not that being black, being female, and being lesbian, whether taken singly or  'intersectionally,'  should disqualify anyone from a government job;  the point is that they cannot count — to a sane and reasonable person — as qualifications sans phrase. 
 
Equity' is (or was) a perfectly good word that leftists have hijacked and re-defined to mean equality of outcome/result. Linguistic hijacking has proven to be an effective  leftist tactic. Leftists are subversive of right reason and natural order and the mother of all subversion is the subversion of language. Hence the wokester predilection for Orwellianisms, e.g., "Abortion is health care." 
 
B.  In Malcolm's concluding sentence he alludes to humility and the questions it raises in the present context. He suggests that he himself is insufficiently humble. Is humility then something good? I was put in mind of a couple of lines from a poem by Goethe:
 
Zitat-nur-die-lumpen-sind-bescheiden-brave-freuen-sich-der-tat-johann-wolfgang-von-goethe-111215

This is not easy to translate, but the thought is that only the worthless are modest; the good celebrate the deed.  The good are not humble, but accomplished; they are made happy by and celebrate their accomplishments. The couplet has a Nietzschean, and thus anti-Christian flavor. Here political theology enters the picture.
 
Suppose the Christian God exists. Then we all are equal, and not just in the eyes of the law, or by abstraction from our positions in the various hierarchies mentioned above, or via some such conceit as John Rawls' Original Position behind the Veil of Ignorance.   We are equal not just de jure but de facto. We are equal in fact as sons and daughters of one and the same eternal Father. The fact is not empirical but metaphysical. The equality is a function of the infinite distance between the all-perfect God and mortal man with his manifold imperfections.  The natural hierarchies that so impress us here below are nothing to God: all the empirical differences of physical prowess, IQ, etc. shrink to nothing from the divine point of view.
 
One unavoidable question is whether the political equality of persons can be maintained without a theological foundation. Suppose there is no Judeo-Christian God. What could possibly support the manifestly anti-empirical belief in equality? After all, it is a plain fact that we are not equal in the ways mentioned above.   If reality is exhausted by the natural (space-time and its material contents) and is thus in principle empirically accessible 'all the way down and up,'  then what possible basis could belief in equality of person have?  What would make this belief non-illusory?
 
I would say that if you are not an anti-wokester, if you do not reject the DEI agenda and all the depredatory absurdities that follow in its train, such as the assault on merit, then you are not sane and reasonable.  Does it follow that the anti-wokester who is an atheist and a naturalist must also be a rejector of equality in all its senses? To specify and sharpen the question: Is there any rational justification, on the assumption of atheism and naturalism,  for holding, as I in fact do, that slavery is a grave moral evil?
 
ComBox now open.

Has Satan Taken Up Residence in the Vatican?

Reach for a supernatural explanation only after having exhausted naturalistic ones. That's a maxim of mine.  But there are so many outrages being perpetrated these days by so many people who ought to know better, people in high places, that I am sorely tempted to suspect something diabolical at work. And I am not the only one given to this suspicion.

Here is an example. "An Italian monastery worth millions is another in a succession of religious houses being shut down by the Vatican for questionable reasons." You decide what's going on here.

If you want to secularize and thereby destroy Christianity, an otherworldly religion if ever there was one, then you are well-advised to demolish the monasteries, not all at once, but slowly, one by one, so as not to call attention to your Satanic mischief. An incremental approach to the excremental, to put it scatologically.

Kierkegaard (1813-1855) rightly described Christianity as "heterogeneity to the world." Monasticism is one form this heterogeneity takes. I must immediately point out, however, that S. K. was himself anti-monastic.  I have a post on this which I need to find, revise, re-think, and upload to Substack.

While you are at Crisis Magazine, please read the pithy A Brief History of Our Annihilation. I could quibble with some of the points, but the basic drift, I fear, is correct. And the drift is downward, into the Pit.

Along the same dark downward trajectory, Satanic Grammy Awards . . . Brought to you by Pfizer.

I did not watch the Grammies because of my personal 'no pollution' policy: do not allow toxins into your body or into your mind/heart except in such limited quantities as are harmless or necessary to stay informed of such developments it would be imprudent to remain ignorant of.

Finally, The Return of the Anti-Christ. You will know him by his lies, descended as he is from the Father of Lies.  No, not Joey B, or Alejandro Mayorkas, or or Al Gore of the "boiling oceans" climate prophecy delivered to the faithful in Davos.  You know who I am talking about.

But as I said at the outset, we invoke the supernatural only after we have exhausted naturalistic explanantia. So, secularists, what explains these developments?

Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children

Top o' the Stack.

Related: Our Little Barbarians. Excerpts:

Recently, an establishment called Nettie's House of Spaghetti in New Jersey announced they will no longer allow children under 10 to dine at their restaurant.

The move caused controversy, with some respondents applauding the policy and others accusing Nettie’s staff of being “child haters.” But the top commenter at MSN.com summed the issue up succinctly:

“We don't hate your kids,” she wrote. “We hate your parenting.”

[. . .]

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin observed. “As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Failing to recognize this truth is deadly. President Ronald Reagan once warned that “[f]reedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”; focusing on freedom, however, as so many today do exclusively, is to put the cart before the horse. For Reagan’s statement is only true insofar as virtue is never more than one generation away from extinction.

[. . .]

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato spoke about this when saying that a child should ideally be raised in an atmosphere of nobility and grace (i.e., our modern culture’s antithesis) so that he can develop an “erotic” — as in emotional, not sexual — attachment to virtue. Once accomplished, he’ll be more likely to accept the dictates of reason upon reaching the age of reason.

Would it kill the writer to insert a parenthetical reference to the passage in Plato where the philosopher makes the claim attributed to him?  More importantly, 'erotic' in a Platonic context, while it does not mean sexual, is not well glossed as 'emotional.' 'Aspirational' would be much better. Eros is the love of the lower for the higher, the love by one who lacks for that which he lacks. Socrates' love of wisdom is erotic or rather 'erothetic': God's love of Socrates is agape, the love of the higher for the lower, a love predicated on fullness.  The love of friends who are equals is philia.  Each of these three different forms of love is different from sexual love, if you want to call sex love.

[. . .]

So take heed, because the brats running around in restaurants today will be running, and ruining, the country tomorrow — and those who’ve not mastered themselves will be mastered by tyrants.

The truth of the first independent clause is exemplified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That this narcissistic tweeting twit, this know-nothing, this overgrown teenage girl can be elected (twice) to  the Congress of the greatest nation that has ever existed presages the soon-to-occur fall of said nation.  I predict that it will occur before the Earth is rendered uninhabitable by 'climate change' including the "boiling oceans" Al Gore warned us about recently at Davos, Switzerland, a country with enforced borders.

"But she was elected by the people!" True, assuming no electoral 'irregularities' (to put it euphemistically); but a democracy in which the people lack the virtue to vote wisely is no better than a monarchy  and in many cases far worse. 

Here you will find the latest moronic outburst by the tweeting twit.

The Chinese Trial Balloon, Realpolitik, and What it Excludes

Now this you should read. Excerpt:

If I’m right, Beijing’s chief reason for floating a balloon over North America was to see whether it would elicit a response from the U.S. government and military, as well as from the American people.

And so it did, judging from the subsequent uproar in the press and on social media. Advantage: Xi Jinping & Co.

Now China will use what it learned about American psychology to sharpen its “three warfares” strategy. Three warfares refers to China’s all-consuming effort to shape the political and strategic environment in its favor by deploying legal, media, and psychological means. This is a 24/7/365 endeavor, and it’s in keeping with venerated strategic traditions.

After all, Mao Zedong—the Chinese Communist Party’s founding chairman and military North Star—instructed his disciples that war is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed.

In the Maoist worldview, in other words, there is no peacetime. It’s all war, all the time for Communist China.

"War is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed." Strongly reminiscent of von Clausewitz: "War is politics by other means." Both exemplify Realpolitik. What does Realpolitik exclude? It excludes any politics based on otherworldly principles such as Christian principles. Does it not?

The exclusion is implied in this passage from  Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin, 1968, p. 245):

The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular — be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

"Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters." Nietzsche says something similar somewhere in his Nachlass.  I paraphrase from memory. (And it may be that the thought is expressed in one of the works he himself published.)

The philosopher  is like a ship with insufficient ballast: it rides too high on the seas of life for safe navigation. Bobbing like a cork, it capsizes easily.  The solid bourgeois, weighted and freighted with the cargo of Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof, ploughs deep the waves and weathers the storms of Neptune's realm and reaches safe harbor.

The philosophers who shouldn't be given any say in matters mundane and political are of course the otherworldly philosophers, those I would dub, tendentiously, the 'true philosophers.' There are also the 'worldly philosophers' discussed by Robert L. Heilbroner in his eponymous book, such thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.

The 'true philosophers,' which include Plato and his opposite number Nietzsche, have something like contempt for those who would occupy themselves with the human-all-too-human alone.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sweet and Wholesome

I once asked a guy what he wanted in a woman. He replied, "A whore in bed, Simone de Beauvoir in the parlor, and the Virgin Mary on a pedestal."  An impossible trinity. Some just want the girl next door.

Bobby Darin, Dream Lover. With pix of Sandra Dee.

Audrey Hepburn, Moon River

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind, 1956. I'll take Lady Gogi over Lady Gaga any day.

Doris Day, Que Sera, Sera, 1956.  What did she mean? The tautological, Necessarily, what will be, will be? Or the non-tautologically fatalistic, What will be, necessarily will be? Either way, she died in May.

……………………….

Mendocino Joe writes to recommend Joan Baez, Fare Thee Well. Great song, great rendition, great video.  I seem to recall Dylan once opining that Joanie's voice is too good, too pure.  To my ear it is sometimes annoyingly shrill in the upper registers. But not in this wonderful version of Dylan's Farewell Angelina. Though not particularly sweet and wholesome, this eldritch version by the man himself better captures the magic of the  '60s for those of us who, open to the Zeitgeist, lived though them in their impressionable years.

Speaking of eldritch, this version of Blue Velvet by Lana del Rey suggests itself. I wouldn't bracket her with Sandra Dee or Doris Day.  

London Ed writes to express sadness that I did not mention "the passing of the great old man of pop," Burt Bacharach.  "Many choices of songs and arrangements but I will go for this.  Fine lush orchestral arrangement and lovely contralto from Diana Krall, who also plays a mean piano."

Ed has good taste. One of my Hal David-Burt Bacharach favorites is this number performed by Jackie de Shannon, mid-'sixties. Back to sweet and wholesome. Back story:

Co-songwriter Burt Bacharach revealed in his 2014 autobiography that this song had among the most difficult lyrics Hal David ever wrote, despite being deceptively simple as a pop hit. He explained that they had the main melody and chorus written back in 1962, centering on a waltz tempo, but it took another two years for David to finally come up with the lyric, "Lord, we don't need another mountain." Once David worked out the verses, Bacharach said the song essentially "wrote itself" and they finished it in a day or two.[2]

The song's success caught the two songwriters completely by surprise, since they were very aware of the controversy and disagreements among Americans about the Vietnam War, which was the subtext for David's lyrics. Bacharach has continuously used the song as the intro and finale for most of his live concert appearances well into the 2000s. (Wikipedia)

 

False Memory

Yesterday I intended to print a document, loaded the paper tray, and then got sidetracked by a phone call.  I forgot about the print job. This morning I falsely remembered having printed the document and then wasted time searching for it. 

What philosophical juice might one squeeze from this lemon?

1) Not all memories could be false. If all memories were false, then one could not know, using memory, that some memories are false. But I do know, by memory, the truth that some memories are false. Therefore, it is not possible that all memories be false. 

2) If presentism is the view that only temporally present events exist, and that wholly past and wholly future events do not exist, then the above example shows that presentism thus defined cannot be true. For I now veridically remember yesterday's intention to print the document, yesterday's loading of the tray, and yesterday's phone call. These events occurred, and I now know they occurred; hence they cannot now be nothing.