Author: Bill Vallicella

Can a Dead Animal be Buried?

Arguably not. Here is an argument:

1) A dead animal can be buried if and only if it is identical to its corpse.

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Therefore

3) It is not the case that a dead animal can be buried.

Argument for (2):

4) If a dead animal is identical to its corpse, then it survives its death as a corpse.

5) No animal survives its death as a corpse.

Therefore

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Lone PrarieSuppose you hear that I was involved in a terrible auto accident. You ask whether I survived. You get the response, "Yes, here he is in the morgue. The good news is that he survived; the bad news is that he is dead." If you find that response absurd, then you will accept (5) and with it (3), and you will understand that a dead animal cannot be buried. You will agree that you cannot bury me, "on the lone prarie" or anywhere; you can only bury my corpse which is not me. Even if I am only a living human body, I am not identical to 'my' corpse either before death or after it.

 

When an animal dies, it ceases to exist, and you cannot bury what does not exist.

But intuitions differ. Suppose that a 200 lb. man dies in his bed, and that a man is just a living material thing.  If the man ceased to exist at death, but the 200 lb. mass in the bed did not, then something new came into existence in the bed, a corpse. If that sounds absurd, you may be tempted to say that one and the same thing that was alive is now dead, and that that one thing  will be buried. So you did bury old Uncle Joe after all and not merely his remains.  And the old cowboy's request not to be buried on the lone prarie, where the coyotes howl and wind blows free, makes sense.

Welcome to the aporetics of death and burial.

Word of the Day: Gallimaufry

A gallimaufry is a hodgepodge. 

The word is of course white-supremacist so be careful  of the contexts in which you use it, assuming you dare use it.  After all, if correct grammar is racist, as per the Rutgers English Department, then a large vocabulary must also be.  Don't forget: anything blacks are poor at is ipso facto racist, and that holds in spades for ipso facto.

'Gallimaufry'  is also a useless word and for two reasons. First, 'liberals' have so eroded standards that almost all have impoverished vocabularies; hence nothing will be communicated by the use of this word.

Second, in this Age of Levelling, the  use of the word in question will be perceived as effete, and possibly epicene; you will be thought to be putting on airs.  It is a verbal bow tie.

Let it Go!

You allow mental clutter to collect in memory, and then you repeatedly sift through it, keeping it alive and present. What good is the memorial rehearsal of failures, foibles, and fatuities, of missed opportunities, and unpleasant encounters?

Let it go, not quite forgetting the details, but relaxing one's grip on them, while preserving the lessons.

A Not So Happy Warrior

Mark Steyn on Mike Adams (1964-2020):

He "seemed like" a happy warrior, but who knows? It's a miserable, unrelenting, stressful life, as the friends fall away and the colleagues, who were socially distant years before Covid, turn openly hostile. There are teachers who agree with Mike Adams at UNCW and other universities – not a lot, but some – and there are others who don't agree but retain a certain queasiness about the tightening bounds of acceptable opinion …and they all keep their heads down. So the burthen borne by a man with his head up, such as Adams, is a lonely one, and it can drag you down and the compensations (an invitation to discuss your latest TownHall column on the radio or cable news) are very fleeting.

Trump Delivers Once Again and Ends AFFH

This is a major victory against the Left.  Stanley Kurtz:

I am pleased to report that President Trump and Secretary Carson have together put an end to the Obama-Biden administration’s wildly radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. President Trump has delivered on this issue in a way that will preserve American liberty in general, and the freedom and self-government of America’s suburbs in particular.

Perhaps you saw Kurtz on Life, Liberty, and Levin last night. An impressive guest on the best political show on TV. 

La Decadenza

Dr. Vito Caiati writes:

Relevant to your post “The ‘Catholic’ ‘Universities’ Have Become Jokes: Fordham,” I call your attention to an interview by Marco Tossati of Archbishop Viganò, defender of the faith, on the evil that permeates the Bergoglian regime and the much of the Church, the “three elements” of which the latter characterizes as “heresy, sodomy, and corruption –[which] are so recurrent that they are almost a trademark of the deep state and of the deep church.”

As the interview, The Pope and the Sodomites, makes clear, here, we are generally dealing not with what you term “the unwitting agents of the demonic” but rather with fully conscious ones, who are bringing one of the greatest institutions and religious traditions of our civilization to ruin.  The cycle of decay in the Church and in Western society at large is rapidly accelerating . The moral horrors and violence that we are now witnessing in society, culture, and politics, orchestrated by the Left,  were largely unimaginable only a few years ago. This is not going to end well. “Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle against the wickedness and snares of the devil….”

I too do not see how this can end well.  The Left is now drawing from a cesspool of nihilism that  is reasonably viewed as literally demonic. The Unholy Spirit of he who "always negates" presides over them. But I still maintain that most of the agents of destruction "know not what they do":  they are foolish, pampered youth, products of an affluent and permissive society, brought up with no moral training by materialistic parents . . . in short, useful idiots, or as I say,  useless idiots.

BLM is Playing by the Book. Alinsky’s Book

Michael Brown:

In his insightful, 2009 mini-book, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, David Horowitz quoted an SDS radical who wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

As Horowitz explained, “In other words the cause — whether inner city blacks or women — is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all-consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals.”

When it comes to BLM, the purported issue, namely, that Black Lives Matter, is not the ultimate issue. Instead, a larger cultural revolution is the ultimate issue. (As many have noted, the founders of BLM are both Marxists and radical feminists, with two of the three women identifying as queer activists.)

And so, the mantra that “Black Lives Matter” specifically means blacks who are victims of white police brutality. Black lives in the womb do not matter. Blacks getting gunned down in gang violence do not matter. Black toddlers killed in random shootings do not matter. Not even blacks killed by black police officers matter — at least not nearly as much as blacks killed by white officers.

Those white officers, in turn, represent the larger system, which, we are told, is fundamentally racist. And it is that system that needs to be overthrown.

Thus, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Read it all, comrades.