Author: Bill Vallicella

Michael Kearns, Profile in Civil Courage

Erie County Clerk Michael "Mickey" Kearns took his first legal step to fight a new state law that allows immigrants in the country illegally to obtain a New York State driver's license.

At the time the illegal aliens receive, illegally, their driver's licenses, they will be able to register to vote, again illegally. Now in possession of photo ID, they will be able vote illegally in our elections.

The contemptible Dems profess to be worried about Russian interference in our elections. But these Democrat scumbags actively support illegal-alien interference in our elections. They are mendacious, hate-America leftists.

So please don't complain about a culture of contempt. Comrades Cuomo and de Blasio and all the rest of their ilk are fully deserving of contempt. Sorry David French, but these people are not fellow citizens but domestic enemies.

‘Expressive Individualism’ is Becoming a Buzz Word

Or rather a buzz phrase. What does it mean, and where is it from?

Where [Alasdair] MacIntyre used the term emotivism to name our moral predicament, in their classic 1985 study of American society, Habits of the Heart, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-writers identified two powerful strands of American thought that in some ways correspond with the managerial and therapeutic types: utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism.

[. . .]

. . . American culture is arguably even more strongly influenced by the second form of individualism, which arose in opposition to the drive toward ever greater efficiency and control. “Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.” The archetypal expressive individualist, according to Bellah, is Walt Whitman, whose most famous work, Leaves of Grass, begins with the words, “I celebrate myself.” For Whitman, in contrast to Franklin, the goal of life is not to maximize efficiency for the sake of material acquisition but rather to luxuriate in sensual and intellectual experiences, to take pleasure in one’s bodily life and sexuality and to express oneself freely, without any concern for social conventions.

The article infra vigorously attacks Trump as the president of expressive individualism.  No mention is made, however, of that expressive individualist, the sexually insatiable Bill Clinton, who gave his girlfriends copies of Leaves of Grass and who, unlike Trump, went beyond 'grabbing pussy' to actual rape, or so it has been plausibly alleged.  If, as Never-Trumpers believe, character is so important, how can they turn a blind eye to the defective characters of the Clintons?

Like so many such articles, it offers no plan of action, no way forward, no recipe for national renewal. The author hates Trump and mixes in some solid criticisms of the man with some scurrilous ones.

But now let's get practical. You've heard me say more than once that politics is a practical game. It is not just talk. Trump is all we conservatives have. He alone has the courage and the ability to punch back effectively against the omni-destructive Left and impede their destruction of our republic. You say that he's an expressive individualist? Suppose I agree. So what? Hillary is not? Are we not better off now than we would have been under Hillary? Obviously we are on so many fronts: abortion, religious liberty, SCOTUS, Israel, the economy, gun rights, and on and on.

What would the Never-Trumpers have us do? Retreat from politics altogether? There is no retreat from the totalitarian Left precisely because it is totalitarian. Leftists want the whole enchilada. Never-Trumpers don't seem to grasp that politics is always about better or worse. Trump may be bad, but he is better than Hillary or any electable Dem.  They go on about how he lies.   Many of his 'lies' are not lies at all but self-serving exaggerations or self-aggrandizing counterfactual speculations. To paraphrase: Had it not been been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote too! A self-serving, unverifiable, braggadocious, counterfactual conditional.  But because counterfactually conditional, not a lie. A lie is a deliberate misrepresentation of an actual state of affairs. One cannot lie about a merely possible state of affairs.  And when the Orange Man does lie, his lies tend to be harmless unlike the egregiously destructive lies of the Clintons, Obama, and recently Nancy Pelosi who lied brazenly and destructively when she said that the invasion of illegals from the south is a "manufactured crisis."

Members of the "French resistance" will say, "What doth it profit a man to win the culture but suffer the loss of his soul by supporting Trump?" My answer: I don't endorse Trump the man and all of his sybaritic and self-aggrandizing ways; I support his beneficial policies and programs.

The central stupidity of the Never-Trumpers is that they do not grasp that what matters primarily are policies and programs and judicial appointments that will be in effect long after a given president is out of office, not the personal life and shortcomings of the person who serves a term or two.

 

americamagazine.org
Donald Trump: the president of expressive individualism
 

Private Property

The right to private property is another thing leftists don't understand, unless it is their private property. 

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:

The Revolution is good.  But why?  One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create.  The abolition of property is not an end.  It is a means.

This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about.  I include among private property the means for the defense of life, liberty, and property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.  

A Clutter Quotation Attributed to Einstein

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

Quote Investigator turned up nothing with respect to the above. Beware of all attributions, especially those to the great physicist. But the thought's the thing regardless of who said it or wrote it.

Related:

Misattributed to Socrates

A Misattribution Corrected

Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle

On Diachronic or 'Emersonian' Consistency

Once More on the Bogus Aristotle 'Quotation'

True Whether or not Aristotle (or Camus) said it

The Rosenbergs: Still Guilty After All These Years

On this date in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death as atomic spies for the Soviet Union.  They were most certainly guilty as we now know. But no amount of proof of their guilt will stop the Left from lying about them as victims of  American 'fascism.' In those days we weren't the decadent weaklings we have become, unsure of ourselves, and unwilling to defend our nation against deadly threats.

Why, for example, is Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, still alive?  He committed his crimes to the cry of Allahu akbar in 2009, was sentenced to death in 2013, but is still alive.  Why hasn't he been executed?  Why the endless appeals?  

We need a judicial fast track to execution for convicted terrorists.  Justice demands it. 

We have lost our way.  We now longer believe in ourselves. We have elected and re-elected a hate-America leftist fool who actually had the temerity to refer to Hasan's terror as "work place violence."  Many of us feared that he would  be elected for a third term in the guise of Hillary Milhous Clinton. But Trump put a stop to that. Thank God for the Orange Man! 

Believing on Insufficient Evidence

The notion that we should always and everywhere apportion belief to evidence in such a way that we affirm only that for which we have sufficient evidence ignores the fact that belief for beings like us subserves action. If one acted only on those beliefs for which one had sufficient evidence one  would not act as one must to live well.

When a young person believes that he or she can do such-and-such, it is almost always on the basis of insufficient evidence.  And yet such belief beyond the evidence is a sine qua non of success.  There are two necessary conditions of success in life: one must believe that what one proposes to do is worth doing, and one must believe that one is capable of doing it.  In both cases one believes and acts on evidence that could hardly be called sufficient. 

This strikes me as a good maxim:  Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing than not believing. 

For a detailed discussion of what is behind the above remarks, see The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is it Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

Christianity has civilized us . . .

. . . but it has also weakened us.  Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses.  Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices. 

We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment."  A nation that has lost the will to execute its worst and most destructive criminals is a nation not long for this earth.  Can the will to live exist in a people who under no circumstances can muster the will to kill?

One of the fruits of civilization is toleration, that touchstone of classical liberalism.  It is a beautiful thing. It becomes a weakness, however, when it extends to the toleration of those who crucify and behead and throw homosexuals off of buildings.

Crucifixion in Islam:

It is all too common to view the practice of crucifixion as a form of torture and execution from antiquity which hasn’t been used in nearly two millennia, yet this is hardly the case. In fact, crucifixion is a standard means of execution in Saudi Arabia, and there is a growing movement among Islamists to bring back crucifixion as the preferred means of punishment for a variety of crimes, including apostasy from Islam, “fitna,” which is a pliable term which can refer to unbelief or mischief-making, or anything which goes against Islam and Shariah. This is explicitly taught in the Qur’an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off… (Qur’an 5:33).

Ominously for Christians, strongly associated with fitna is “shirk,” the associating of partners with Allah. Believing Jesus to be the Son of God is, for Muslims, one of the worst forms of shirk, and is therefore punishable by death, including crucifixion. (There is a dark irony here, as Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified, yet they prescribe crucifixion as punishment for Christians.)

Read it all. Disturbing images.

Flip-Floppin’ Joe

The inner compass of the professional politician is a weather vane. The political winds having shifted, no one should be shocked that Joe Biden is now against what he was for, the Hyde Amendment. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fathers and Fatherhood

Harry Chapin, Cat's in the Cradle. The best song about fatherhood I am aware of. Bond with your son when he's five. Wait till he's 50 and he won't give you the time of day. Harry Chapin was a major talent who died young.  Here is his great Taxi. We Boomers are damned lucky to have the greatest popular music soundtrack of any generation.

What Happened to Harry Chapin?

Emmylou Harris, To Daddy

Arizona's own Marty Robbins, That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine. The old Gene Autry tune from the '30s. 

Joan Baez, Daddy, You've Been on My Mind. The great Dylan song slightly modified. Not addressed to a literal father, you understand. At :40, the girl depicted is not Joan Baez but Suze Rotolo, Dylan's first New York girlfriend. How do I know that? Because I am a self-certified Dylanologist from way back.

Shep and the Limelites, Daddy's Home, 1961. Anyone who prefers rap crap to this has a hole in his soul.

Rivingtons, Papa Oom Mow Mow. Stretching a bit. 

James Brown, Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, 1965

Horace Silver, Song for My Father, 1964

Hank Williams, I'm a Long Gone Daddy

No, I am not going to link to Alan Sherman, Hello Mudda, Hello Faddah, 1963.

Frank Zappa, Hungry Freaks, Daddy, 1966

Paul Peterson, My Dad. To end on a 'wholesome' if schmaltzy note.  

The Greatest Risk We are Taking

Patrick J. Buchanan:

But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.

Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?

There is none. Most people with a bit of life experience know that one can get along and interact productively with only some people. There has to be a broad base of shared agreement on all sorts of things. For example, there ought to be only one language in the U. S. for all public purposes, English. It was a huge mistake when voting forms were allowed to be published in foreign languages. Only legal immigrants should be allowed in, and assimilation must be demanded of them.

No comity without commonality as one of my  aphorisms has it.

The Left, however, wants the end of America as she was founded to be, "one nation and one people." That is why leftists support the illegal invasion from the south.  But being mendacious leftists they will never openly admit this, but instead speak with Orwellian obfuscation of "comprehensive immigration reform."

The enemy has been identified.

Do not think of leftists and 'progressives' as fellow citizens; they are merely among us as disorderly elements and domestic enemies.  There can be no peace with them because they represent an 'existential threat.' Not to our physical existence so  much as to our way of life, which is of course more important than our mere physical existence as animals.

But I must add, contra certain of the Alt Right, that "one people" should not be understood racially or ethnically. An enlightened nationalism is not  a white nationalism.  America is of course  'a proposition nation.' You will find the propositions in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence.  

I don't give a flying enchilada whether you are Hispanic or Asian.  If you immigrated legally, accept the propositions, drop the hyphens, and identify as an American, then I say you are one of us. I'll even celebrate the culinary diversity you contribute.

That being understood, it is also true that whites discovered these America-constitutive propositions and are well-equipped to appreciate and uphold them, and better equipped than some other groups. That is a fact that a sane immigration policy must reflect.

My view is eminently reasonable and balanced. It navigates between the Scylla of destructive leftist globalist internationalism and the Charybdis of racist identity-political particularism.