If we get tough with them politically, then we may be able to avoid having to get tough with them extra-politically. Let's hope and pray that we only have to prepare to enter the extra-political and not actually go there. For it won't be pretty.
But I see no good reason to be particularly sanguine. The Muse of Blog must be with me this morning: 'sanguine' is exactly the right word.
Robert V. Koepp, long-time commenter at this weblog, died on Leap Day, 2012. Here is what I had to say about him in 2012.
What do they have in common?
Top o' the Stack.
Top o' the Stack
Substack latest.
A piece of glass is fragile in that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. But there is no inevitability in any fragile object's ever breaking. There is no necessity that the disposition be realized. A chocolate bar is disposed to melt in certain circumstances. It has this disposition at every time at which it exists. But it might never be realized: the bar might cease to exist, not by melting, but by being eaten.
Mortality is different. To be mortal is not to be dead, or moribund, but to be liable to die, apt to die, disposed to die. In his last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens, dying of cancer, says that we are all dying. That is not true. What is true is that we are all disposed to die. Every animal, even in the full bloom of heath and fitness, bears within itself this disposition. Its realization, however, is inevitable.
These points are relevant to the evaluation of the Epicurean argument which some dismiss as a sophism: when death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. So death, where is thy sting? The argument seems to ignore the fact that the disposition to die is when I am and at every moment I am, and that therein lies the 'sting.'
We should come back to this.
Top o' the Stack.
Wherein I ruminate upon the curious modality, necessitas per accidens.
Put the question to your friends and acquaintances: Which side are you on? If they are not on the side of civilization, cut them off. Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? If enough of us ostracize enough of them, this will have an effect. (The usual ceteris paribus qualifications apply.)
Here's my take from 2017:
Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:
Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.
The Muslim as the new proletarian.
The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)
Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.
It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.
………………..
And here is another by my man Hanson, the writing machine, on the insanity of leftists. It's on the russia, Russia, RUSSIA! hoax. To hell with these TDS-ers and their self-induced lunacy. They don't seem to grasp that they have a moral obligation to exercise due diligence in the formation of their beliefs. That is an obligation that they regularly flout.
There is just no moral or intellectual equivalence between Right and Left.
Scene from "Tombstone."
B. B. King, Nobody Knows You when You're Down and Out
John Fogerty, When Will I Be Loved? This cover of the old Everly Bros. tune is now my favorite.
Beach Boys, When I Grow Up (to be a Man)
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes In
Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In
Laura Nyro, And When I Die
Percy Sledge, When a Man Loves a Woman
Bob Dylan, When I Paint My Masterpiece
The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece
Bob Dylan, When the Deal Goes Down
More:
Jackie de Shannon, When You Walk in the Room
Warren Zevon, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
Good theme music for a post on the difference between dying and falling asleep.
Substack latest.
I explain what it means over at Substack.
I refute the fragile Kristol and articulate what the inarticulate Trump cannot. But to this man of action goes the credit of having put paid to Kristol and others of his pseudo-con ilk as well as to the Bush and Clinton dynasties. Jeb! is toast and Chelsea has been strangled in her political crib. Remember Jeb!? The mendacious Hillary has been put to pasture where she chews her cud of resentment.
The book has been recently translated.
Unfortunately, I find myself in agreement with Josef Pieper as to the 'unreadibility' of the book: "The unfinished, and hardly readable book, Analogia Entis (1932), which he himself declares is the quintessence of his view, in fact gives no idea of the wealth of concrete material he spread out before us in those days."
Of course, the book is not strictly unreadable: I am reading it and getting something out of it. But it has many of the faults of Continental writing and old-time scholastic writing.
To make a really good philosopher you need to start with someone possessing a love of truth, spiritual depth, metaphysical aptitude, and historical erudition. Then some nuts-and-bolts analyst needs to beat on him with the logic stick until he can express himself clearly and precisely. Such a thrashing would have done gentlemen such as E. Gilson and J. Maritain a world of good. Gallic writing in philosophy tends toward the flabby and the florid, and the same goes for many Europeans to the east of France.
Example du jour: 'Gun Buy Back'
Top o' the Stack.
He most certainly is if 'democracy,' as per the woke Orwellian switcheroo — to give it a name — refers to plutocracy, rule by the wealthy. The plutocratic elites of the present time, unlike those of yesteryear, are woke open-borders globalists with no commitment to their countries of origin. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are good examples. You will recall Hillary's endless mouthing of 'our democracy,' not that it has stopped. The superannuated and hyper-mendacious cow has been put out to pasture, thanks to DJT, but the attention-obsessed greed head won't stay there.
That the USA is a plutocracy is convincingly argued by Peter Turchin in End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin, 2023). When Turchin, no conservative, tells us that the USA is a plutocracy, he means that ". . . at the top of the power pyramid in America is the corporate community: the owners and managers of large income-producing assets . . . ." (124-5) The economic elites rule America indirectly by dominating the political class by lobbying and the like. (125) "The two power networks, economic and administrative, are jointed at the hip" with the economic network in the dominant position. (125) "The corporate community also controls the ideological basis of power through the ownership of mass media corporations . . . ." (125)
In nuce: Hillary is homo mendax, and not just her: we do not have a democracy, but a plutocracy, and Trump, billionaire that he is, is a threat to it in his role as populist.
Nick Short at Tom Klingenstein's place quotes from Tucker Carlson's interview of Mike Benz:
Benz: You had this new power within DHS to say that cybersecurity attacks on elections are now ‘our purview.’ And then they did two cute things. One, they said mis-, dis-, and mal-information online are a form of cybersecurity attack; they are a cyber attack because they are happening online. And they said, well… we’re actually protecting democracy and elections. We don’t need a Russian predicate after Russiagate died.
So just like that, you had this cybersecurity agency be able to legally make the argument that your tweets about mail-in ballots — if you undermine public faith and confidence in them as a legitimate form of voting, you were now conducting an attack on U.S. critical infrastructure by articulating ‘misinformation’ on Twitter…
Carlson: So, in other words, complaining about election fraud is the same as taking down our power grid?
Benz: Yes. You could literally be on your toilet seat at 9:30 on a Thursday night and tweet, ‘I think that mail in ballots are illegitimate.’ And you were essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security classifying you as conducting a cyber attack on U.S. critical infrastructure because you were doing ‘misinformation’ online in the cyber realm, and ‘misinformation’ is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions.
It really is as bad as that. As for mail-in ballots (except for certain narrowly restricted classes of people, e.g. military personnel serving abroad) they are an open invitation to voter fraud, an invitation that has been and will continue to be widely accepted. The invitation is of course part of the overall strategy of the Left to destroy our republic.
Herewith, yet another reason why anyone who is not a destructive, hate-America leftist must support Trump, warts and all, and is a contemptible idiot oblivious to his own long-term best interest if he doesn't.
