We have all made mistakes. But if we have learned their lessons, they have served a good purpose. Let us not compound our blunders by dwelling on them. Do not forget them, but do not dwell on them. Retention in memory subserves a salutary humility; to dwell on them impedes the project of one's life and beclouds the road up ahead.
Homo viator is not here to rest, but to get on with it.
Here:
With no police or security within sight, Mark and Patricia McCloskey stood with their backs to their house wielding a small pistol and an AR-15. The “peaceful protest” featured a screaming scrum of hundreds smashing down the gate to a privately-owned neighborhood as they poured onto the privately-owned street just a few feet from the McCloskey residence. Considering the many buildings the mobs in recent weeks have burned, the victims they have assaulted, and the neighborhoods they have destroyed, the McCloskeys determined to remain physically safe, if terrorized. The mob screamed at and taunted the McCloskeys. But it dared not assault the armed homeowners.
[. . .]
We’ve been told we don’t need "weapons of war" to protect ourselves because the police will do that job. Let’s be honest: against such forces the police can’t even protect themselves. Not since the post-Civil War reconstruction era have mobs conquered not one, but two police installations in major metropolitan areas. We don’t have to hypothesize about a potential breakdown in civil order. We have one. When the mobs have the political winds at their backs, the police are easily overwhelmed.
What might the mob have done to the McCloskeys had they not produced a credible firearm deterrent? The McCloskeys reported seeing at least one handgun in the mob. They recounted how the mob threatened to burn down their house and harm them. This wasn’t an NRA fantasy invented to justify opposition to gun control laws. It happened. From June 29, 2020 onward, all bans on private ownership high-capacity magazines should be deemed unconstitutional.
NOTA BENE: I had to remove the innocuous internal links in the excerpt quoted above to keep the entire post from being blocked. This is only the second time this has happened in all my years on TypePad. The first time was yesterday. A harbinger of things to come!
RELATED: Time to ARM
Last night on Judge Jeannine. I quote from memory:
Half of the Republicans are Democrats, but all of the Democrats are Democrats.
Related: Bongino Report
No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality.
E pluribus unum is a noble goal. But a durable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many. Not just any diversity is combinable into unity.
This is why the oft-repeated 'Diversity is our strength' is foolish verbiage that could be spouted only by a liberal-left shallow pate.
We blew it as a society and now we are in trouble and teetering on the brink of collapse. No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality. The commonality that insures social harmony requires the stoppage of illegal immigration and reasonable limits on legal immigration together with the demand that potential immigrants be assimilable and willing to assimilate. But we no longer have the will to make that demand. We don't even have the will to protect the borders.
But of course foolishness about immigration and its effects is only one part of the explanation of our decline and eventual dissolution.
Still, we fight on, but only part-time because, being conservatives, we understand that the political is but a limited sphere. So ride the bike, traipse the trails, make music, draw and design, contemplate the constellations, make love to the wife.
Above all, lift up your eyes, if you can, to a Reality superior to this passing scene, superior to this vain world whose vanity will vanish along with it.
Not to mention resistance and defiance. Hats off to President Trump for last night's magnificent speech in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. And a happy Fourth to all patriots.
Great minds on "All men are created equal."
Johnny Cash, I Won't Back Down. Tom Petty wrote it, with Jeff Lynne.
Byrds, Chimes of Freedom. One of Dylan's greatest anthems.
Byrds, I Wasn't Born to Follow
Good YouTuber comment: "I keep searching for that door back into the summer of '69, I lost it somewhere long ago."
Tim Hardin, A Simple Song of Freedom
Crystals, He's a Rebel
Rascals, People Got to be Free
Bob Dylan, I Shall Be Free. This is the first time I've heard this particular delightful 1962 outtake. A real period piece in the style of Woody Guthrie with appearances by Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, John F. Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean's great granddaughter, fallout shelters . . . .
Cream, I Feel Free
Roger Kimball appreciates its magnificence and writes about it brilliantly:
The president was especially strong in challenging what is perhaps the most obnoxious manifestation of our petulant antinomianism—that species of politically correct intolerance that has come to be called “cancel culture.” In essence, cancel culture is the malignant inversion of liberalism’s defining virtues, openness and tolerance. It is born of historical ignorance and a stunning lack of empathy—an ironic fact, since one of the chief premises of cancel culture is its own supposed superior sensitivity.
In fact, the emotional payload of cancel culture is not more sensitive than its accommodating alternative, just more narcissistic. It operates by proxy, filing claims for redress on behalf of a ghostly population of abstractions: “indigenous peoples,” slaves of yesteryear, and on and on in an endless litany of complaint.
What is not at all abstract, however, are the effects of cancel culture. As the president noted, it is wielded as a weapon, “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.” In a word, cancel culture is “the very definition of totalitarianism” and is “completely alien to our culture and our values.” It should have “absolutely no place in the United States of America.” And here is where his speech took on a steely seriousness. “This attack on our liberty must be stopped,” he said, “and it will be stopped.”
In short, the president has promised to cancel cancel culture. Is that a contradiction, a violation of the spirit of tolerance he has promised to uphold? No.
The enemies of civilization routinely use and abuse its freedoms in order to destroy it. Candid men understand this and act to prevent it. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.”
[. . .]
We know that all of our most pathological cities have been run as Democratic monopolies for decades. Donald Trump had the temerity to point this out. We know that our public schools are increasingly factories of left-wing, anti-American indoctrination. The president had the temerity to point that out as well. The narrative is that Trump is a crude and bumbling ignoramus, but can you imagine Joe Biden or any other Democrat in office today having the moral courage and clarity of mind to say this:
The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities run by liberals, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism and other cultural institutions. Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country—and to believe that the men and women who built it, were not heroes, but villains. The radicals’ view of American History is a web of lies—all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.
The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.
Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.
Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.
Illustrate by adducing the sad cases of Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein.
Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.' Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short. People have miserably limited vocabularies and cannot think critically.
The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Standards are low. Don't expect much.
This week, Senate Republicans continue to beclown themselves. During a June 30 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind.) fumbled his way through a heated interview about his bill to make it easier to sue police officers and his support for Black Lives Matter. Just as statues of Christopher Columbus started to fall across the country, Senators James Lankford (R-Ok.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) introduced a bill to scrap Columbus Day and instead declare a national holiday for Juneteenth.
The following is from a reader who takes issue with Chad McIntosh's Euthanizing Liberty. Secondarily, he takes issue with me since I basically endorse McIntosh's contentions. McIntosh maintains that
. . . the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, [is] a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.
According to my reader:
Chad's article is interesting, but short-sighted. The humanities aren't ever going to close entirely . . . . My issue is that as long as our current culture is converting people and otherwise pushing out [producing?] lefties, it's only a matter of time until they take over the country. Suppose Trump wins. What are you going to do in five years? How is he going to change the culture and stop the country from becoming more and more liberal? He's stopping some of the bleeding and slowing the left down, and that is reason to vote for him over alternatives, but let's not get carried away. I'm reminded of what Peter Hitchens said in his recent interview with Eric Metaxas talking about Christianity disappearing from e.g. political discourse: "Once you've given away that ground, it's hard to see what you can do to fight back." It seems to me that Christianity was needed to renew conservative values with each generation. Without it (or some suitable replacement), unless we fix the superstructure to include it (or a replacement), it's only a matter of time.
My reader appears to be arguing that humanities departments ought not to be shut down because they impede to some slight extent the total leftist takeover of the culture. But that impedance can happen only if some conservatives manage to get jobs, and eventually tenure, in these departments. These hardy souls, however, would have to hide their conservative beliefs to get hired in the first place, and then carefully keep them hidden for six or so years until they — if they are lucky — get tenure. So during that time they would be unable to do anything to impede the spread of leftism. But once tenured, they would not be safe either, for any espousal of conservative positions would get them branded racists and white supremacists, and, as we all know, tenure affords no absolute protection if the administrators and the faculty really want to get rid of you.
More fundamentally, any conservatives in humanities departments that are allowed to speak and publish and influence students and get tenure would be vastly outnumbered by their leftist 'colleagues.' So the net effect of keeping the humanities departments in operation would be a further poisoning of the culture with 'woke,' i.e., benighted, leftist nonsense.
So isn't McIntosh right to celebrate the closure of humanities departments, even if the closures are motivated by the wrong reasons, e.g. the failure of business types to grasp the value of the humanities (properly understood and properly taught)?
And wouldn't it be better for serious truth-seekers to abandon the present-day pseudo-universities and set up their own competing institutions, both on-line and with brick and mortar? Back to my reader:
As an aside, it's nice that he [McIntosh] holds you [BV] up as an example of an independent scholar, but I don't think a scholar of equal ability would be taken even fractionally as seriously as you are if he hadn't also held a professorship in the past. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you having gotten that "stamp of approval" is important.
Getting taken seriously is much more a matter of publishing competent work in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals and presses. That does not require having a Ph.D., or an academic post, or having had a (tenured, full-time) academic post. My being retired from a tenured, full-time academic post does nothing to enhance my credibility in the eyes of leftists for whom I remain a 'racist,' a 'white supremacist,' and and a 'theocrat.' And to these despicable people, any proof that I might proffer that I am not any of these things is just further proof that I am.
It is important to realize just how sick and destructive academe has become, and not just in the humanities and social sciences. A prime example at the present time is the tenured fool, Robin DiAngelo.
Leftism is not a religion, but it is importantly like a religion.*
How so? Religions make a total claim on the lives of their adherents, and the committed latter live accordingly. The serious Buddhist, for example, does not merely meditate for an hour in the morning; he tries to bring the mindfulness of the meditation chamber into his whole day. He essays to live the Dharma. It is the same with serious Jews, Christians and Muslims despite their different beliefs and practices. The serious religionist sees everything from the point of view of his religion. It is not just a Friday, or a Saturday, or a Sunday thing.
It is the same with the serious leftist: his commitment is total to his totalitarian scheme. He politicizes everything — even the native flora of California — because, in his preternatural wrongheadedness, he thinks everything is political. Everything must be held hostage to the glorious Revolution at the secular, or immanent, eschaton to be brought about by the 'woke' who know and hate the true Devil whose name is 'Racism.'
But of course the political is but a part of reality and not the whole of it. The leftist is an idolater of a piece of finitude, the political sphere within the realm of Finite Being. But if God exists, then the Absolute exists and to live with total devotion to the Absolute cannot be idolatry. Matthew 22:36-40 New International Version (NIV):
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
It should be easily understood, therefore, why the Left is violently and viciously opposed to religion, even to the point of working in cahoots with Islam to destroy Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity. The Left will brook no competition in the totalitarian sweepstakes.
_________________
*It is a logical error to suppose that if X is like Y, then X is a species of Y. Dennis Prager makes this mistake. But then he is merely a talk jock, even if one of the very best.
Be self-critical out of self-respect, not self-loathing.
Fox News is destroying the opposition. Hats off to Tucker Carlson for his hard-hitting commentary and civil courage in the teeth of vicious opposition from Democrat-leftist scum. And note the demographic in which Carlson dominates. This is a good sign indeed. True, the elderly, who tend to list in a conservative direction, are dying off. But their passing will not be the passing of conservatism and common sense: young 'uns will step up. And as they age they will grow in wisdom and become increasingly angry at how they have been cheated.
As was the case in total viewership, Fox News led by Carlson, dwarfed the competition in the 25-54 demo.
In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.*
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.
In the Principle was the Exemplary Expression, and the Exemplary Expression was with the Principle, and the Exemplary Expression was the Principle.
…………………….
*That unity-in-difference, and difference-in-unity, is a dialectical difference. It is an affront to the discursive intellect with its abrupt and frozen diremptions, but approximates the fluidity of life.
You know things are getting bad when a bookman must also be a rifleman if he intends to keep his private library safe from the depredations of leftist thugs who are out to 'de-colonize' it. You cannot reach these evil-doers with arguments, for it is not the plane of reason that they inhabit; there are, however, other ways to each them. The gentle caress of sweet reason must sometimes give way to the hard fist of unreason.
This raises an important moral question. Are there cultural artifacts so precious that violence against humans in their defense is justified? I should think so. For those out to 'cancel' high culture have no qualms about 'cancelling,' i.e., murdering its creators. That is one consideration. But also: haven't the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration? Do they form a moral community with us at all?
I am just asking. Or is inquiry now verboten?
