Month: March 2024

No Person is Illegal!

That's true. No person is illegal. But who ever said that any person was?

'Woke' knuckleheads  of the sort who  recently criticized Joey B's SOTU reference to Lincoln Laken Riley's murderer as 'an illegal'  regularly give something like the following lame argument:

1) No person is illegal.

2) If any person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien,' then some persons are illegal.

Therefore

3) No person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien.'

Therefore

4) The expression 'illegal alien' and such related expressions as 'illegal immigrant' must be banned.

There is no need to concern ourselves with the inferential move from (3) to (4).  The argument is unsound because (2) is plainly false.  

To see that it is false you have to be able to distinguish between agent and action, between doer and deed.  'Illegals' are so-called because of their illegal action, namely their illegal entry into the country, and not because they themselves, as agents, are illegal.  

Of course, an appeal to sweet reason will get you nowhere with a leftist; what they understand is the hard fist of unreason.  

As I have said many times, it is unreasonable to expect that all disputes can be settled reasonably.

And yet we have to have reasons at the ready for the reasonable.   

That is why I wrote the above. Besides, I'm a natural-born scribbler who just loves to write, and loves to read what he has written. The life of the mind is its own reward. 

Soaring Auto Insurance Rates

I received the bill for my 2013 Jeep Wrangler Sport the other day: $302.89 for six months. For the preceding six months I paid 274.09, and the six months before that 260.42. So yesterday I paid my agent a visit and reminded him of my stratospherically high credit rating, my lack of claims, my sterling driving record, my low mileage, my loyalty to the company, the whole shot.

He explained that  rates had gone down during the Great Covid Scare (my term not his) due to less driving but now were headed up again; Biden-flation (my term not his); and because e-vehicles are much more expensive to repair than gas drinkers (my term again).  All true. So I paid the bill and left.

On arriving home I flipped on Jesse Watters who had a segment  on young people and how they are getting hammered on rates. His focus was on onboard surveillance technology. Now if old people are unduly cautious on the roads and dangerous for that very reason, young people are worse, being impetuous, reckless, ignorant of physics, bereft of a proper sense of their mortality, without experience of life automotive and otherwise, distracted by their devices, distractive of each other, etc.   So they do stupid things at the wheel, the data gets sent to the insurance companies, and their rates skyrocket.

For example, I'm 'hauling donkey' in the fast lane doing 75-80 mph and some punk in a compact death-trap is on my ass.  I'm doing everything right, driving my Jeep as if it were a motorcycle: exercising due diligence, maintaining situational awareness, cycling through my mirrors and gauges, planning escape routes, staying out of blind spots, keeping my distance from other vehicles and especially from overloaded junk wagons.  I am engaging in automotive profiling. So the punk in the crapmobile tries to get around me, endangering himself, his passengers, and everyone around him.

The punk's high rates are the just wages of his automotive sin.

Of course, this is a deep and vexing topic. I don't want to live in a Sino-styled, omni-surveillant, Stasi-redolent police state! Damn you Dementocrats! Liberty trumps security! If you don't agree you are axiologically unfit to be an American. Go live in China or board the next time machine back to the USSR. Or the DDR. On the other hand, when the people lack virtue, automotive and otherwise, and will not govern themselves, then the plutocratic-pathocratic-totalitarian thugs have a plausible justification for their clamp-down and 'plausible deniability' of their malfeasance.

There is a lot to discuss. Here is something that I didn't know but that comports well with the pathocratic scumbaggery of wokeassed leftards:

Not all states allow car insurance companies to take gender into account. These six states prohibit the use of gender when pricing auto insurance:

How unspeakably stupid can an unspeakably  stupid reality-denying leftist be? But that is exactly what you would  nowadays expect in the once great and golden State of Californication and the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. 

Bare Assertion and Circularity

"There is no evidence because there is no evidence." Thus some shyster defending Hunter Biden against charges of wrongdoing. I am tempted to call this a presuppositional approach to political apologetics. 

A circular argument is an argument, but because the 'diameter' of the circle is zero, it is no better than a bare assertion. It is a bare assertion dressed up as an argument. You could say that it is a bare assertion in argumentative drag. 

You know about bare assertion: quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. How delightful the pithy punch of this Latin tag! Unpacked, and replacing the indicative mood with the permissive, the point is that whatever may be gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied.  Thus, with no breach of logical propriety, I am allowed to meet your bare assertion with a bare counter-assertion. From a logical point of view, there is nothing to choose between the two. Or as Hegel writes in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, ein trockenes Versichern gilt gerade so viel als ein anderes. (Felix Meiner Ausgabe, 66)  ". . . one dry assurance counts exactly as much as  any other." 

So why did the shyster give a circular argument in defense of Joe Biden's scumbag son? Was he so embarrassed to make a palpably false bare assertion that he felt the need to smuggle it in  under argumentative cover?  "See? I'm not just asserting; I'm arguing."

By the way,  "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," as the old folk saying has it.

The Charlottesville Lie

The only sure way to stop a leftist from lying would be by stopping him from talking. The Biden administration is one of the most, or the most, mendacious in our history. Copycat that he is, Biden saw the Clintons and Obama get away with it and resolved to go them one better. A brazen liar and serial plagiarist, truth decay has rotted his soul. Will Nancy Pelosi pray for him?   Dennis Prager:

Most people will tell that you that President Trump called Neo-Nazis “fine people” during his famous press conference following the Charlottesville riot. But he never did. So, why do so many believe it? CNN political analyst Steve Cortes explains how the Charlottesville lie happened and why it’s so dangerous. See the video here and then pass it on to family and friends. Then after they’ve seen it, ask them if they still believe “the lie”?

Under six minutes.

A ‘Temporal’ Argument Against Race Change

The following excerpt is 'cannibalized' from my Substack article, Can One Change One's Race?

…………………

Can I change my race? No. I can no more change my race than I can change the fact that I was born in California.  I might have been born elsewhere, of course, but as a matter of contingent fact, I am a native Californian.  Despite the logical contingency of my California birth, there is nothing I or anyone, including God, can do, or could have done, after the fact, to change or annul that fact about my place of birth.  And there is nothing I or anyone can do, or could have done, after the fact, to alter my place of birth, time of birth, weight, or any other contingent detail.

The same goes for race. My race is determined by my biological ancestors. Since both were white, I am white.  To change my race I would have to change a past fact, namely, that I am the product of the copulation of two white parents. But that fact, being past, cannot now be changed or annulled. The argument, then, is this:

1) If I can change my race from white to black, say, then I can change some fact in the distant past, namely, the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;

2) It is not the case that I can change any past fact including the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;

Ergo

3) It is not the case that I can change my race.

The argument assumes that it is nomologically necessary (necessary given the laws of nature) that parents of the same race have offspring of the same race, that, e.g., white parents have white offspring. The assumption is obviously true. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Lawrence Auster on Bob Dylan


Lawrence Auster
I was surprised, but pleased, to find that the late Lawrence Auster, traditionalist conservative, photo above, 1973, had a deep appreciation and a wide-ranging knowledge of Dylan's art.  Born in 1949, Auster is generationally situated for that appreciation, and as late as '73 was still flying the '60s colors, if we can go by the photo, but age is not even  a necessary condition for digging Dylan, as witness the case of Thomas Merton (1915-1968) who was early on into Dylan and Baez.  Auster's Jewishness may play a minor role, but the main thing is Auster's attunement to Dylan's particularism.  See the quotation below.  Herewith, some Dylan songs with commentary by Auster.

The Band, I Shall Be Released.  Auster comments:

This Dylan song can seem amorphous and mystical in the negative sense, especially as it became a kind of countercultural anthem and meaningless through overuse. But the lyrics are coherent and profound, especially the first verse:

They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
But I remember every face
Of every man who put me here.

The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part. The singer is saying, No, this isn’t true. Things have real and particular values and they cannot be cast off and replaced by other things. And, though we seem to be distant, we are connected. I am connected to all the men, the creators and builders and poets and philosophers, and my own relatives and friends, who have come before me or influenced me, who created the world in which I live.

Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine). 

First off, some comments of mine on the video which accompanies the touched-up Blonde on Blonde track.  The video is very cleverly constructed, providing a synopsis of milestones in Dylan's career.  The first girl the guy with the acoustic guitar case is walking with is a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, the girl 'immortalized' on the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover.  But now we see the pair from the back instead of from the front.  She is replaced by a second girl representing Joan Baez.  (Dylan's affair with Baez helped destroy his relationship with Rotolo.) Then the guy gets into a car and emerges on the other side with an electric guitar case.  This signifies Dylan's going electric in '65 at the Newport Folk Festival, a change  which enraged the die-hard folkies and doctrinaire leftists who thought they owned Dylan as a mouthpiece for their views.    A quick shot of a newpaper in a trash can with the headline "Dylan Goes Electric" appears just in case you missed the subtlety of the auto entry-exit sequence.  After that we see a downed motorcycle representing Dylan's motorcycle accident, an event that brings to a close  the existentialist-absurdist-surrealist phase of the mid-60s trilogy, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  After the accident Dylan is further from the mind and closer to the earth.  Dylan the psychedelically deracinated returns to his roots in the Bible and Americana with John Wesley Harding. The girl in the brass bed is an allusion to "Lay Lady Lay" ("lay across my big brass bed") from the Nashville Skyline album.  Dylan then coalesces with the man in black (Johnny Cash), and steps over and through the detritus of what remains the hippy-trippy 60's and into the disco era, his Christian period, marked by the 1979 Slow Train Coming and a couple of subsequent albums, his marriage to a black back-up singer, and on into the later phases of the life of this protean bard on a never-ending tour.

Here is what Auster has to say about the song:

By the way, that’s the first time I’ve seen “judge” rhymed with “grudge” since Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” from Blonde on Blonde. Here’s the recording.

Dylan’s lyric (not for the first time) is pretty appropriate to our situation:

Well the judge
He holds a grudge
He’s gonna call on you.
But he’s badly built
And he walks on stilts
Watch out he don’t fall on you.

There is now on the U.S. Supreme Court an intellectually sub-par Puerto Rican woman whose entire career has been essentially founded on a grudge against whites, a judge who makes her pro-Hispanic, anti-white agenda an explicit element in her judging. “The judge, she holds a grudge.”

Sotomayor is not the first of that kind, however. Another Supreme Court sub-competent, Thurgood Marshall, openly stated to one of his colleagues that the philosophy behind his judging was that “It’s our [blacks’] turn now.”

Spanish Harlem Incident.  (From Another Side of Bob Dylan)  Auster's take:

Thinking about the murder of motivational speaker and “positive, loving energy” guru Jeff Locker in East Harlem this week, where he had been pursuing an assignation with a young lady not his wife but got himself strangled and stabbed to death in his car by the damsel and her two male accomplices instead, I realized that this is yet another contemporary event that Bob Dylan has, in a manner of speaking, got covered. Here is the recording and below are the lyrics of Dylan’s 1964 song, “Spanish Harlem Incident,” where the singer, with his “pale face,” seeks liberating love from an exotic dark skinned woman, and is “surrounded” and “slayed” by her. The song reflects back ironically on the Jeff Locker case, presenting the more poetical side of the desires that, on a much coarser and stupider level, led Locker to his horrible death. By quoting it, I’m not making light of murder, readers know how seriously I take murder. But when a man gets himself killed through such an accumulation of sin and gross folly, a man, moreover, whose New Agey belief in positive energy and transformative love apparently left him unable to see the obvious dangers he had put himself in, there is, unavoidably, a humorous aspect to it.

SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENT

Gypsy gal, the hands of Harlem
Cannot hold you to its heat.
Your temperature is too hot for taming,
Your flaming feet are burning up the street.
I am homeless, come and take me
To the reach of your rattling drums.
Let me know, babe, all about my fortune
Down along my restless palms.

Gypsy gal, you’ve got me swallowed.
I have fallen far beneath
Your pearly eyes, so fast and slashing,
And your flashing diamond teeth.
The night is pitch black, come and make my
Pale face fit into place, oh, please!
Let me know, babe, I’m nearly drowning,
If it’s you my lifelines trace.

I’ve been wonderin’ all about me
Ever since I seen you there.
On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding,
I know I’m ‘round you but I don’t know where.
You have slayed me, you have made me,
I got to laugh halfways off my heels.
I got to know, babe, ah, when you surround me,
So I can know if I am really real.

 There's more.  There's always more.

Reading Now: Alex Marlow, Breaking Biden

Subtitle: "Exposing the hidden forces and secret money machine behind Joe Biden, his family, and his administration." (Threshold, 2023).  Excerpt:

Intellectually, Republicans understand that to have a nation, you need a border.  [. . .] But the establishment isn't going to solve a problem if the solution is going to cost them a lot of (any?) money, even if the fate of our nation depends on it.

Unless, of course, we are talking about Ukraine's border with Russia. Then it's essential, heroic even, to have a border and defend it. After all, that border isn't keeping out cheap workers and future voters.  (p. 249)

The RINOs and the Democrats are one in that they both want open U. S. borders, albeit for different reasons. The RINOs want cheap labor while the Dems want future votes. Thus talk of a 'uniparty' is apt. The RINOs are in cahoots with the woke globalist plutocrats and have no concern for American workers or American culture. They think they will always be able to find sanctuary somewhere with their wealth and connections, and in the meantime they are content to be lapdogs of the Left and continue to receive invitations to the toniest Beltway soirees. The 'cuckservative' label fits them nicely.  Civility and 'character' are so important to Mitt Romney, for example, that he refuses to support Trump because of his 'bad character' while ignoring that of Biden which is far worse. Liz Cheney is another disgusting specimen of this Never-Trumper species.

Marlow sums up his book here.

10,000 Page Views Yesterday!

What explains yesterday's traffic surge? 

My average is 1200-1300 page views per diem. Recent posts are nothing to get excited about. It is not as if their quality is superior to what I regularly crank out.  Have I 'triggered' some woke 'influencer'? Pissed off a powerful pol? Is the NSA rifling through* my vast archives preliminary to my incarceration?  But surely I am way too obscure for it to be cost-effective to send me to the gulag.   

Is some AI monster grabbing my  content to regurgitate or repackage?

I solicit your hypotheses.  

___________

*'Riffling through' in British English.

Kathy Hochul, Leftist Idiot

Head over to Malcolm Pollack's place for some sensible commentary. Meat quote:

Political thinkers from Hobbes to Schmitt have understood that the fundamental principle that legitimizes the power of the State is the reciprocal obligation of obedience and protection. We cede to the State the awesome power of coercion by threat of violence, and in return we expect a guarantee of our public and personal security. This means that when the State abandons its side of that obligation, it is the right, and the duty, of the citizenry to secure their own protection.

That's right. It follows that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms.  The rate of exercise of that right stands in inverse relation to the failure of the State to guarantee our public and personal security.  The more the government fails to do what it is supposed to do, chiefly, protect life, liberty, and property, the more citizens will arm themselves.

From this you can see just how preternaturally stupid (or deliberately self-enstupidated) libs, lefties, and wokesters are. Presumably, they want fewer guns in civilian hands.* Their policies, however,  incentivize gun ownership by Joe and Jane Citizen. 

In a piece defending Viktor Orban against the mindless charge of being a 'fascist dictator,' Rod Dreher writes,

Unlike London, Paris, Washington, New York, Brussels, and elsewhere, street crime is very low in the Hungarian capital — and that’s not because the police are everywhere.

Think about it: just this week, the governor of New York [Kathy Hochul] ordered the state’s National Guard troops to patrol New York City’s subways to crack down on violent crime there. This never, ever happens in Budapest. Ever. A British friend traveling this week in New York said the scene outside his lodgings in Manhattan is appalling, with scores of African men — illegal aliens who came through Mexico — loitering on the street and urinating in public. That doesn’t happen in Budapest either, because Hungary is a country that controls its borders.

Read it all.

__________

*And so do I. It can't be good to have all sorts of untrained people packing heat.  I defend 2A rights, but I would never try to persuade people to arm themselves. Gun ownership is a grave responsibility. You have to get training, you have to practice, and you have to know the law.  Before you even think about buying a gun, you need to develop situational awareness. As the noted trainer Steve Tarani says, "If you have to go to guns, there has been a failure in situational awareness." That is a very slight exaggeration, but not by much. Another trainer, retired Navy SEAL Chris Sajnog here discusses ten ways to improve your SA.

What is the worst enemy of SA? The smartphone. Don't be a dumbass with a smartphone. Don't walk around with your head up your app!  

The Cashless Road to Totalitarianism

During the Great Covid Scare, some restaurants stopped accepting  cash payments for health reasons.   Whatever the intention, that is a policy that aids and abets an incipient police state.  Exaggerate some health threat. Inspire fear in a gullible populace of highly suggestible conformists. Ban cash in the name of public health.
 
Result? Everyone making payments leaves a paper trail. People can be monitored as to where they go, where they shop, what they eat and drink., what they read. Too many visits to Joe's Real BBQ for paleolithic vittles and your social credit score goes down. Get the picture?
 
Corollary:  Cede control of health care delivery to the government and they can tell you how to live, what to eat, drink, ride. Ride a motorcycle? Dangerous activity! Government has a reason to ban them if they are picking up the tab for health care.
 
Addendum: Are we a gullible populace of highly suggestible conformists? Well, do you remember all the people walking around in the open air wearing masks? Or people driving alone in their cars with windows up wearing masks?   
 
Where is the independence of mind? Are we Americans or obedient Germans?
 
CBDC? Up yours, fascist.