Month: April 2025

The Fall of Saigon

Fifty years ago today. I wrote in my journal (30 April 1975):

Saigon was overrun by the communists today. 150 billion dollars and 50,000 American lives wasted during the war.

58,00 is now the standardly cited figure. Goeffrey Wawro, The Vietnam War: A Military History (Basic Books, 2024, 652 pp.):

The war had killed 58,000 Americans, 250,000 ARVNs, [South Vietnamese army] half a million South Vietnamese civilians, and 1.4 million NVA [North Vietnamese army] and Viet Cong. Four million Vietnamese . . . had been killed or wounded. [. . .] In their rushed evacuation, the Americans left behind important files, including the names of 30,000 Vietnamese who had worked in the Phoenix Program. These people were the first to be rounded up, tortured, and killed by their "liberators." Two and a half million South Vietnamese were placed under arrest as nguy — "puppets." Anyone affiliated with the old regime was sent without trial to one of the 300 "thought-reforms" camps in rural areas. (529)

Wawro goes on to describe the brutality of the labor camps and the 165,000 political prisoners who died in them. Like the Khmer Rouge, the NV commies lied to their victims, promising them a detention period of only ten days for "re-education." The vast majority of them fell for the lies and ended up detained for up to fifteen years in starvation conditions.

The great David Horowitz died yesterday.  Here is a worthwhile article about the former red-diaper commie who came to his senses. Charlie Kirk pays his respects on X. Now I know how Stephen Miller came to be so astute:

Twenty-five years ago, David mentored a high school student named Stephen Miller. He supported him through Duke, through the Senate, and into the Trump White House. Today, Stephen is one of the most impactful architects of America First immigration policy. A legend thanks to David's mentorship. As Politico wrote, “If you want to understand the immigration policies [Trump] has put into place, you have to also understand Horowitz.” David's fingerprints are all over the populist revival of the last decade.

What did I do during the war?

Around  the time of the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, I was ordered  to downtown Los Angeles for my "pre-induction physical." Due to a birth defect I have hearing in one ear only, and so I failed the physical. I was  classified 1-Y, which was later changed to 4-F.  In any case I had won a California State Scholarship to attend college, and that would have kept me from harm's way for four years, after which the lottery kicked in.

That's my story in a few words. What's yours?

Political Crapulosity

In the early 'eighties I subscribed to The New Republic. But in those days it hadn't yet become the politically crapulous rag it is now.  Try to wrap your head around this load of garbage:

There is much to say about these 100 days. The odor of fascism is unmistakable—and entirely intentional. The bullying of universities and law firms . . . the purposeful lawlessness of so many actions, designed to force showdown after showdown at what Trump assumes will be a pliant Supreme Court; the daily inversion of reality peddled by Karoline Leavitt, Cabinet officials, and not least Trump himself.

Refutation would be easy enough. But this stuff is beneath refutation. You don't refute lunatics or engage them in conversation. 

We have a war on our hands, friends, and you'd better man and woman up.  Especially you young people who can expect to be around for a while.

How much of this vitriolic filth is TDS and how much willfully perverse self-enstupidation? How could anyone in his right mind fail to see the good that  Trump has done in a scant 100 days?  

You are well-advised to invest in precious metals in the broad sense of the term.  Our political enemies are just that, enemies: there can be no peace with them. I now seriously question whether we should remain polite in our dealings with them.

Such a Wonderful Pope!

Simon Caldwell via Jim Bowman:

He [Pope Francis] used his authority to protect sinister friends from justice, such as Father Marko Rupnik, a fellow Jesuit who was accused of the serial rape of more than a dozen nuns, sometimes in quasi-satanic rituals. Rupnik was excommunicated latae sententiae (automatically) after he granted absolution in the confessional to a woman with whom he was having sex. This was an offence of such enormity under the Code of Canon Law that only the Pope could lift the sentence. Rupnik was rehabilitated and to this day is a priest in good standing who is living in a convent (where else?). It is good to have friends in high places.

This  is hard to believe. Can you corroborate the above from your sources, Vito?

De mortuis nil nisi bonum has an expiration date, and in the case of some it comes up quick.

A-Eternalism and B-Eternalism

In an earlier thread, I raised the following problem for eternalism:

Long ago, in ancient Rome's Coliseum, gladiatorial battles took place. No one will say that such battles are still going on, or that any such battles are occurring at present. But if eternalism is true, and a past gladiatorial battle is as real/existent as a present battle in the Ukraine, say, except that the first occurs at an earlier temporal location than the latter, then it seems that the gladiatorial battles are tenselessly occurring — which is highly counterintuitive.

Suppose time travel is possible. Suppose we travel back in time to the gladiatorial battles in the Coliseum. Will we find slaughter going on there? If so, then the name 'eternalism' will be most apt: the slaughter will continue eternally. But this is highly counterintuitive!

Malcolm Pollack responded:

Well, there's the problem for eternalism, as I've noted before: it offers no explanation for the subjective experience of time's passage; for why the fundamental fact of our experience is a succession of "nows" that come and go; for the sequential privileging of small (but not infinitesimal!) slices of M [the four-dimensional manifold of events/spacetime points] as "now". I think it must be connected deeply, or even somehow identical with, that other titanic mystery, namely that of consciousness.

But the problem I am raising is different.  It arises whether or not we bring consciousness into the picture.  We will be able to appreciate the difference between Pollack's problem and mine if we distinguish between two types of eternalism, A-eternalism and B-eternalism.

A- and B-eternalism both reject the presentist restriction of what exists*, i.e. what exists simpliciter, to what exists (present-tense). Thus both types of eternalist hold that past, present, and future items exist*. The two positions agree as to temporal ontology: they agree about what there is in time.  The ontological question, Quine famously said, is the question formulable in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: What is there?  So the temporal-ontological question is: What is there in time? On this question, both types of eternalist agree.

The two types differ, however, in that the A-eternalist accepts that there are such irreducible non-relational properties as presentness, pastness, and futurity – the so-called A-properties – whereas the B-eternalist denies that there are any A-properties: there are only the B-relations. Thus the two types of eternalist differ over the nature of time, but not over what there is in time.  The A- and B-eternalists differ over the nature of time in that they differ over whether real time, time as it is in mind-independent reality, is exhausted by the B-series, the series of events ordered by the dyadic B-relations, earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with. The B-eternalist says that real time is exhausted by the B-series. The A-eternalist demurs: there are, in addition to the B-relations, the A-properties, the monadic or non-relational properties of presentness, pastness, and futurity.

The A-eternalist is equipped to admit the non-subjective passage of time. Temporal passage is real  independently of our subjective time-conscious inasmuch as it consists in the shifting exemplification of  the monadic (non-relational) A-properties by the events in the B-series. Consider, for example, three events/processes: my birth, my present blogging, and my death.  My death exemplifies the property of being future but will soon enough lose that property and come to exemplify the property of being present, after which it will come to exemplify the property of being past, and then ever more past.  My present blogging — the blogging of this very post — will become past and ever more past. My birth which is now past will become ever more past.  The three events themselves are 'eternal' in the somewhat strained sense of existing, though not occurring, at every time.

The A-eternalist's admission of A-properties allows for the real separability of temporal presentness from existence. This allowance in turn allows for a 'moving spotlight' theory of time according to which temporal passage is real (and thus neither merely apparent nor illusory). So when I die I lose the purely temporal property of being present but I remain in existence* and come to acquire the purely temporal property of being past.  When I die I will 'move away' from the present by becoming wholly past and ever more past. Or you could think of the 'moving spotlight' of the Now moving forward and leaving me 'in the dark,' i.e., non-present. Non-present but not non-existent*!

In sum, on A-eternalism, temporal passage is real and non-subjective, hence neither merely apparent nor illusory (as the great McTaggart thought).

Political Nominalism

One form political nominalism takes is loyalty to a political label. 

In late November I heard a self-described "life-long Democrat" on Fox cogently explain why Kamala Harris lost the election and why her political career ought to be over. Despite the accuracy of his analysis, the fool remains a Dem! That makes no sense. When the thing labeled no longer exists, why cling to the label?

It is not as if the old Democratic Party can be brought back. The transmogrification unto wokery has proceeded too far. The young Turks have taken it over, the 'woke' squadristi mainly, AOC et al.,  and the members of the old guard (Pelosi, Schumer, et al.) are on their last legs. But there is no fool like an old fool, and a huge, but dwindling, number of useful idiots still vote Democrat out of misplaced loyalty to an empty label or else because of their delusional opposition to Trump. But they, like Pelosi & Co., will soon pass into the night, and the sooner the better, not that I wish them physically dead; I wish them politically dead. The physically dead can't make political mischief.

But wait a minute! Don't the dead vote in Dementocratic precincts?

 

Philosophy and Science: Continuity or Discontinuity? Presentism Meets Physics

Malcolm Pollack writes,
 
I hope you'll forgive me for hammering you with emails, but I just wanted to thank you for inviting me to join you in giving this paper a careful going-over. [Christian Wuetrich, "The Fate of Presentism in Modern Physics" in New Papers on the Present, Philosophia Verlag, 2013, 91-131. ] It has given me, as a civilian, yet another opportunity to appreciate the care and attention to detail that professionals in your field must bring to their work. I was struck in particular by this paragraph, from section 3:
 
  "The acceptance of a conflict between presentism and not only SR [Special Relativity], but all of current, as well as prospective, fundamental physics paired with an insistence on presentism amounts to a rather comprehensive rejection of physics. It thus fundamentally contravenes naturalism, a venerable tradition going back at least to Aristotle. According to naturalism, philosophical—and metaphysical—inquiry is continuous with scientific inquiry. To be sure, naturalism is not a logical truth—it is a substantive philosophical thesis. But it is one whose defence has to wait for another day; for present purposes, I simply assume a minimal naturalism which demands that no philosophical thesis be in manifest contradiction to facts established by our best science. Restricting this weak thesis to metaphysics, it can be translated as necessitating that the physically possible worlds are a subset of the metaphysically possible ones, for if the metaphysical theories were in contradiction to the physical ones, then there would have to be some physically possible worlds (and perhaps all) which are metaphysically impossible, as for the metaphysical theory to be incompatible with physics, it would have to rule out some physically possible worlds as impossible. In other words, metaphysics would a priori deem impossible what physics affirms is possible. Assuming that all physically possible worlds are also logically possible, I see little justification for disavowing this weak form of naturalism." 
 
I find this precision, clarity, and style delightful entirely on its own, quite apart from any conclusions it may be leading to. Much obliged.
 
Malcolm,
 
I thank you in return for giving me the opportunity to achieve clarity on these topics in connection with a book on metaphilosophy I must finish before the Grim Reaper (Benign Releaser?) lops my head off.   As a chess player you know what it is like to be in time trouble with Sudden Death looming, except that it this case it is a scythe and not a flag that will fall.  And what the fall will end won't be a mere game.
 
I will begin by listing some of the main points in W's article, clarifying the key terms, and formulating some of the issues that arise.  Ask any questions or make any objections that occur to you. If you find anything I say less than clear, say so.  Double quotes mean that I am literally quoting the author. For all other purposes I use single 'quotes.' (One of those uses is instanced in the immediately preceding sentence.) Numbers in parentheses are page references.
 
1) The author is committed to thinking of time as spacetime, a four-dimensional manifold M composed of "points."  (92) These are spacetime points or temporal locations specifiable by x, y, z, and t coordinates, where a spacetime point is a punctuate (duration-less) instant.  I take it that M is a continuum so that, between any two instants, or temporal locations, there are continuum-many (2-to-the-alepth-null) instants or temporal locations. This assumes Cantorian set theory and the actual (as opposed to potential) infinite.  But then  on the same page, he speaks of "events."  As I see it, an event is not the same as the time(s) at which it occurs.  (The occupant of a spatiotemporal location is not the same as the location it occupies.) I should think that there are times when nothing happens, i.e., when no event occurs,  but that whenever an event occurs it must occur at a time or over times.  The same goes for spacetime points. Some are unoccupied by physical events, no? An event that is not punctuate like an instant I call  a process, even it it lasts only a nanosecond. Nanoseconds and related terms pertain to the "metric" which applies to M. (92)  An example of a process, i.e., an extended event, is a storm or a melody.  A side point worth pondering is that the universe, supposing it began to exist with a Big Bang, could be metrically finite (12 or so billion years old) despite M's having the cardinality of the continuum, which implies that there are continuum-many events/times between now and the Big Bang
 
One of the issues that arises here, one not discussed by W., is whether concrete things such as the piano on which the melody is played can be "assayed" (technical term of Gustav Bergmann with mining provenience) as extended events or processes. If so, then pianos and piano players have temporal parts in addition to spatial parts — a view vehemently denied by many philosophers.  A melody is not wholly present at every time at which it exists; is the same true of Billy Joel? Melodies and storms unfold over time; they have phases. Do persons unfold over time? Is a person a diachronic collection of person-phases? A person persists through time, no doubt — 'persists' is a datanic term  in my lexicon — but does he persist by enduring or by perduring? Is a person or a concrete thing/substance wholly present at every time at which it exists or not? This question goes to the back burner.
 
2) Given the fundamental presupposition that time is in reality spacetime, eternalism and presentism are defined by the author as follows. Eternalism is "the position claiming physical existence for all events in M," whereas presentism "partitions events into past, present, and future events" together with the proviso  that only the events belonging  to the present partition enjoy ontological privilege. (92) "Thus the sum total of physical existence is a proper subset of that according to the eternalist." (92)
 
This I find less than clear. What does the author mean by physical existence? As opposed to what? Surely not mental or abstract/ideal existence.  Does he mean the existence of events at times, as opposed to the times at which they exist?  An event is not the same as the spacetime point or points at which it occurs.  Is it not obvious that the occupant of a location, whether spatial or temporal or spatiotemporal, is not the same as the location? A location exists just as well occupied as unoccupied. Does the author mean to tell us that events exist physically but that times, though they exist, do not exist physically?
 
Connected with this lack of clarity is the following objection. Presentism is usually explained as the view that temporally present items (whether times or events or members of other categories) alone exist, and thus that wholly past items and wholly future items do not exist, where 'wholly' rules out overlap with the present.   If that is what is meant by presentism, then W. hasn't captured it in his definition.  For if present items are a proper subset of all existing items (spatiotemporal locations  and events at those locations) then those past and future items also exist. But then we are no longer talking about presentism.  Presentism is precisely the denial of the existence of the past and the future. The author appear to be begging the question in favor of eternalism by assuming that eternalism is true and that presentism can be defined in terms of it.  This ignores the fact that eternalism and presentism are mutually exclusive.
 
If presentism is the logical contradictory of eternalism, then what exists according to presentism cannot be a proper subset of what exists according to eternalism.  The author my be fudging the issue with his obscure talk of physical existence.
 
3) We were told that presentism partitions M into past, present, and future events.  Now what makes present events present? Here is where simultaneity comes into the picture.  Simultaneity is an equivalence relation (reflexive, symmetrical, transitive) that effects the partition that creates a proper subset of events, the present ones, and distinguishes them from those to their past and those to their future.  This puzzles me for a couple of reasons which I will sketch now, and try to explain more clearly tomorrow.
 
First, the present as we experience it is not punctuate but specious, in William James's sense of 'specious.' It has a certain spread or duration.  'Now' in 'The sun is now rising' picks out a short period of time that had not yet begun when the sun was below the horizon and will be over a short time later, say in an hour. Sunrise is not an instantaneous event by a a process.
 
Second, how does what the author says distinguish the present present from past and future presents? After all, at every time or temporal location t in M there is an equivalence class of simultaneous events at t. It follows that there are many — continuum-many! — presents, each equally present at itself.  The present present, however, is not merely present at itself, but present simpliciter. It is the 'privileged present,' the absolute present.  Presentism is committed to an absolute present. So again, it seems that our author has not put his finger on what privileges the present present, and distinguishes it from past and future presents.
 

The Fallibility of Memory: Chamberlain, Chambers, Communism

The other day I was trying to recall the name of the author of Witness and I came up with Houston Chamberlain. The author, of course, is Whittaker Chambers. The confusion was presumably sired by 'Chamber.' 

Memory, though infirm, is not wholly unreliable. If it were, I would not have been able to realize my mistake.

Whittaker Chambers on Beethoven

Whittaker Chambers (Witness, p. 19) on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:

. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michelangelo's vision of the creation.

Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, these late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.

In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we achieve a glimpse of what music is capable of.  Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading hacks such as Ayn Rand or positivist philistines (philosophistines?) such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.

Witness deserves pride of place on every anti-commie bookshelf. Its literary merit is second only to its great historical value. It is essential reading if you would understand the communist mentality which is carried on in diluted but equally dangerous form in the contemporary Democrat Party in the USA.

Look on the Bright Side!

The world is rife with pathologies of all sorts: spiritual, psychological, moral, and medical. But it's all grist for the thinker's mill. That is the bright side. One can allow oneself to become depressed at how pathetic we all are — in different ways and to different degrees — or one can cultivate wonder at our strange predicament and get to work understanding it, thereby squeezing the joys of theory from practical misery.

The Atheist

Substack latest.

A rumination 'inspired' by Paul Brunton. An embedded article confronts Sam Harris, one of the "four horsemen" of the New Atheism, which is now old hat.  As old hat as the expression I just used. There's nothing new under the sun,  saith the Preacher, and in these hyperkinetic times, what's new gets old quickly. The New Atheism is as passé as folk music, as passé as blogging, although some among the superannuated are still at it and will be until blindness, dementia, or death doth part us from it.  

Curiously, thanks to Trump, Vance, and others, Christianity is now 'cool' among a large segment of youth. But don't get too excited about this development: it is in good measure driven by conformism and crowd behavior and by the lust to turn a buck, as witness 'prayer apps' and Martin Scorsese's latest offerings.

If you need an app to pray I will say a prayer for you. As for  Scorsese's latest, I didn't watch any of it, considering it, whether rightly or wrongly, sullied by his and his pal Robert de Niro's glorification of mafiosi and other assorted scumbags in such productions as Goodfellas and Casino. 

The Dangers of Psychic Phenomena on the Spiritual Quest

The thoughts of Paul Brunton well presented in a short video. I have been reading him for years. Like Thomas Merton, the man is at his best in his journals. I have read and re-read all sixteen volumes. For some extracts see my Brunton category. 

Pope Francis Dead at 88

I have issued some trenchant statements over the years about the late Pope Francis, but for now my watchword is: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  I will only add that in the wee hours of yesterday's vigil, before I became aware of Francis's passing,  I was re-reading Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's 1968 Introduction to Christianity in pursuit of the question lately raised about the meaning of "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36) I was once again impressed by the power and penetration of the thinking of the man who later became Pope Benedict XVI. As I was admiring Ratzinger's philosophical and theological 'chops,' I thought disparagingly of the pope now passed.

Our friend Vito Caiati sent me this morning a rather more incisive  take on the late pope.

I would like to share my thoughts on the current reaction to the death of Pope Francis, which I find worrisome and which reminded me of some advice of Montaigne on speaking of the powerful after death.

He writes:

“Among the laws that relate to the dead, it seems to me very sound those by which the actions of princes are to be examined after their decease. They are equals with, if not masters of the laws, and what justice could not inflict upon their heads [persons], it is reason that it should be executed upon their reputations and the estates of their successors—things that we often value above life itself” (Les essais de Montaigne, v.1, c 3 [my translation]).

All over X, yesterday and this morning, the whitewashing of Pope Francis, by his ideological allies and his “conservative” critics alike, continues unabated. Very few voices—most notably that of Archbishop Viganò*—dare to speak the truth, for self-interest and cowardice continue to rule. So, I ask: After twelve years of deceit, heresy, repression, and scandal, must we now also bear this mindless outpouring of fallacious sentiment, much of it nothing but deception, about this malevolent and destructive man? Rather on these days of all days, must we not, if “justice” is to be served, speak the truth about the grave harms he inflicted on the faithful and the Church?  If truth is not told, the current wave of historical eradication, both that purposely propagated by the leftist, doctrinally tainted episcopate installed by Bergoglio and that arising from the unreflective sentimentality of the masses, may well result in the irredeemable upending of the RCC, which is already in a perilous state of decline.   

 Vito

 * https://x.com/CarloMVigano/status/1914273114587824193