Month: April 2023

Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism II

On 26 January I wrote:

The new global-capitalist woke leftism (GCWL) is very different from the old socialist-humanist leftism (SHL, which I take to include both the Old Left and the New Left). I want to understand the similarities and the differences.

GCWL versus SHL

1) Both are secular and anti-religion.  Since 1789 the Left has been virulently anti-clerical and anti-religious. Nota bene: an ersatz religion is not a religion! So stop calling leftism a religion, Dennis Prager.

2) Both target the middle class.

3) Both are internationalist  and anti-nationalist.

4) The main difference seems to be that SHL is humanist while GCWL tends toward the erasure of humanity and humanism via anti-natalism, paganism, nature-idolatrous environmentalism, misanthropy, Orwellian subversion of language, and leukophobic ethno-masochism and much else besides.

So that's a start. Inadequate, no doubt.

James Soriano responded this morning:

I liked your January 26 post on the Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism, as well as the comments.

Here are a couple of points on the dissimilarities of the “Woke” compared to the “Old” and “New.” 

(1)  Both the Old Left and the New Left were hostile to capitalism, whereas the Woke Left finds it a useful tool.  Today corporations big and small have become “woke” and are friendly to the Woke agenda.  Any corporation insufficiently sympathetic to the Woke agenda is bullied until it wakes up.

(2)  The Old Left got a Russian assist.  After WWI, Russia secretly supported Communist parties and allied organizations in Europe and elsewhere.  These subversive activities continued after WWII and into the New Left period.  By contrast, the Woke Left gets an American assist.  It is not secretive in any way.  It’s in the open.

(3)  The Old Left and the New Left thought of  “revolution” as something that originates in society and then goes on to take over the state.  But “woke” attitudes have already penetrated into the state.  To a “woke” leftist, a revolution can also be something that moves from the state back into society for the purpose of stomping out pockets of resistance.

——

On this last point, we can make a distinction between a revolution BEFORE power and a revolution AFTER power.  

Revolutions taking place before the revolutionaries consolidate power:  Americans in 1776, Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, and Khomeini in Iran.

Revolutions taking place after the revolutionaries consolidate power:  

— 1917.  A small group of Bolsheviks take over the seat of government in St. Petersburg.  The Russian Revolution took place after that event; there was no Bolshevik uprising prior to it.  

— 1932.   The National Socialist German Workers' Party came to power by democratic means.  The Nazi transformation of Germany took place after that event; there was no Nazi uprising prior to it. [It was 1933 — BV]

— Historian Martin Kramer makes this revolution-before-and-after distinction regarding “moderate” Islamists.  Many people in the Arab World fear that “moderates” like the Muslim Brotherhood would use democratic means to take over the state.  They would then go on to Islamize society after they take power.  Wokesters are like that, too.

 

Bars Philosophers Opened after being Denied Tenure

HT: Allan Jackson:
Beer and Trembling
Gin and Platonic
Phenomenology of Spirits
Martini Heidegger
Bellini and Nothingness
Jean-Jacques & Coke
Vodka on the Lockes
Maker’s Marx Old Fashioned.
To this list I add:
 
Rusty Nagel's. (If you got that, I will buy you the cocktail to which I am alluding.)
 
Continuing in the humorous vein, Allan offers:
 
Heraclitus walks into a bar.
Bartender: Oh…You again?
 
I counteroffer:
 
Zeno tries to walk into a bar.
 
Russell never walks into bars, he is only on occasion at bar-proximal places at bar-open times.
 
McTaggart, however, has no time for bars at all.
 
Van Inwagen doesn't believe in bars, but only in bottles and bricks arranged barwise.
 
Jon Barwise was not available for comment.

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies

First, six definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. 

Billy Preston, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, Hear Me Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.  Harrison was the Beatle with depth. Lennon the radical, McCartney the romantic, Starr the regular guy.

Bonus cuts

Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers

Bob Dylan, Gospel Plow

Bob Dylan, See that My Grave is Kept Clean 

Bob Dylan, Father of Night

Iris Dement, Will the Circle be Unbroken?

Andrea Bocelli and Alison Krauss, Amazing Grace

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet

…………………………

JSO sends us to Will You Remember Me? by the Pine Box Boys. The dessicated soul of the secularist is incapable of understanding religion.  He thinks he will eradicate it. But religion, like philosophy, always buries its undertakers.

Spherical Triangles as Incongruent Counterparts?

Fig31.png

Over the last 24 hours I have been obsessing over Kant's spherical triangles.  He claims that they are incongruent counterparts.  Now I understand how a hand and its mirror image are incongruent counterparts.  (A right hand's mirror image is a left hand.) But it is not clear to me how Kant's spherical triangles are incongruent counterparts. Supplement the above diagram with a second lower triangle that shares its base (an arc of the equator) with that of the upper triangle and whose sides are two arcs whose vertex is the south pole.

David Brightly's comment is the best I received in the earlier thread. (He works in Info Tech and I believe he has an advanced degree in mathematics.) He writes,

Not clear to me either, Bill. Why does Kant resort to spherical triangles? [To show the existence of incongruent counterparts.] Consider first two right triangles in the plane with vertices (0,0), (3,0), (0,4) in triangle A and (0,0), (3,0), (0,-4) in B. In plane geometry A and B are considered congruent, not by translation or rotation in the plane but rotation out of the plane ('flipping') with their shared edge as axis. Now think of these triangles on the sphere with edges of length 3 along the equator and those of length 4 on a meridian. The lower triangle cannot be flipped into congruence with the upper—it curves 'the wrong way'. Congruence on the sphere is more restrictive than congruence in the plane. But they are mirror images of one another in the equatorial plane. Likewise, Kant's isosceles triangles cannot be flipped into registration. Has he just overlooked that they can be slid on the sphere into alignment?

As Brightly quite rightly points out, "The lower triangle cannot be flipped into congruence with the upper — it curves 'the wrong way'."  That was clear to me all along.  My thought was that if you rotate the lower triangle through 180 degrees so that its southern vertex points north, it would fit right over the upper triangle. I think that is what David means when he writes, "they can be slid on the sphere into alignment."

In other words, the lower triangle needn't be rotated off the surface of the sphere with the axis of rotation being the common base, it suffices to slide the triangles into alignment and thus into congruence along the surface of the sphere.  

Therefore: Kant's spherical triangles are not incongruent counterparts or enantiomorphs.

Now David, have I understood you? I am not a mathematician and I might be making a mistake.

Consensus and Truth

Consensus is no guarantee of truth.  If all or most of the experts in some subject area agree that p, it does not follow that p is true. But that is not to say, or imply, that consensus has no bearing on truth. A consensus of unbiased and uncoerced experts in a field is a reliable guide to truth in that field, assuming that the consensus is real and not the fabrication of, say, climate hoaxers.

Kant, Spherical Triangles, and Incongruent Counterparts

Buckner demands an argument from incongruent counterparts to the ideality of space. But before we get to that, I am having trouble understanding how the 'spherical triangles' Kant mentions in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, sec. 13,  are incongruent counterparts. Perhaps my powers of visualization are weak. Maybe someone can help me.

I understand how a hand and its mirror image are incongruent counterparts. If I hold up my right hand before a mirror what I see is a left hand.  As Kant says, "I cannot put such a hand as is seen in the glass in the place of its original; for if this is a right hand, that in the glass is a left one . . . ." (p. 13)  That is clear to me.

Now visualize a sphere and two non-plane 'spherical triangles' the common base of which is an arc of the sphere's equator. The remaining two sides of the one triangle meet at the north pole; the remaining two sides of the other at the south pole.  The two triangles are exact counterparts, equal in all such internal respects as lengths of sides, angles, etc.  They are supposed to be incongruent in that "the one cannot be put in place of the other (that is, upon the opposite hemisphere)." (ibid.)  That is not clear to me.

Imagine the southern triangle detached from the sphere and rotated through 180 degrees so that the south vertex is pointing north and the base is directly south. Now imagine the southern triangle place on top of the northern triangle.  To my geometrical intuition they are congruent!

So, as I see it, hands and gloves are chiral but Kant's spherical triangles are not.

Wikipedia:

In geometry, a figure is chiral (and said to have chirality) if it is not identical to its mirror image, or, more precisely, if it cannot be mapped to its mirror image by rotations and translations alone. An object that is not chiral is said to be achiral.

A chiral object and its mirror image are said to be enantiomorphs. The word chirality is derived from the Greek χείρ (cheir), the hand, the most familiar chiral object; the word enantiomorph stems from the Greek ἐναντίος (enantios) 'opposite' + μορφή (morphe) 'form'.

The Problem of Mirror Images

In an e-mail, a correspondent poses a problem that I will put in my own way. 

BV is alone in a room facing a standard, functioning mirror and he is looking at a man, the man in the mirror.  Call that man MM.  So in this situation, BV is looking at MM.  The question is this. Is BV numerically the same as MM? Or is BV numerically different from MM?

Surely it would be absurd to claim that there are two men in the room, the one facing the mirror and the one in (or behind) the mirror. The sensible thing to say is that MM is a mere image of a man, not a man.  And of course it is the image of BV, not of any other man. Accordingly, when BV looks into the mirror, he sees himself via a mirror image. Now most people will stop right here and go on to something else. But philosophers are a strange breed of cat.  They sense something below the mundane surface and want to bring it into the light.  

Suppose BV points in the direction of the mirror and exclaims, "That's me! Look how beat-to-hell I've become!" But if MM is a mere image of a man, and not a man, then BV is not pointing at himself, the man BV, but at a mere image.   This suggests, contrary to the point made in the immediately preceding paragraph, that there is a man in the mirror and that he is identical to BV! In the situation described, we seem to have good reason to affirm both of the following propositions despite their collective inconsistency:

1) BV is pointing at an image, not a man. (Because there is only one man in the room.)

2) BV is pointing at a man. (Because BV is pointing at himself, and BV is a man.)

This has got to be a pseudo-problem, right?  Well then, dissolve it!

A Variant Puzzle

Perhaps the following variant of the puzzle is clearer. BV holds up his right hand  and looks at it in the mirror. With the index finger of his left hand BV points to the hand in the mirror and says, "That is a beautiful hand!" With that same index finger he then points to the hand he is holding up and says the same thing. Pointing as he is in two different directions, BV is pointing at two different things, each of which is a hand.  But then BV has two left hands and one right hand, for a total of three hands — which is absurd. Why two left hands? Because the hand in the mirror is a left hand being the incongruent counterpart of the right hand BV is holding up.

Incongruent counterparts are discussed by Kant in no less than four places, twice in his pre-Critical writings and twice after 1781. More on this later.

Political Polarization

Polarization in a physical body has to have a limit lest the polarized body break apart. (Imagine the distance between Earth's North and South poles — 8595.35 miles — increasing indefinitely.) It is no different with the body politic.  We will eventually break apart or be broken apart by an external force (how about the ChiComs in cahoots with the Russkis?) if our political polarization continues.  United we stand, divided we fall; come on now people, let's get on the ball.  We won't of course.

Time was, when I read Mona Charen and George F. Will with quite a bit of approval. But then Trump came along and both lost their minds.  Here is Will over at The Washington [Com]Post. Take a gander at the comments to gauge the level of present political polarization.

Dear old Mona's latest outburst anent Trump is such that I cannot bring myself to sully my site by linking to it.

Do you want to hear some sane and characteristically brilliant commentary by a lion of the law?  Here is Alan Dershowitz on the Trump indictment. (HT: Vito Caiati)