Author: Bill Vallicella

Gun Violence and Border Control: A Plea to Our ‘Liberal’ Brethren

Dear 'Liberal,'

If you are concerned with gun violence, then you ought to be concerned with controlling the border. A porous border allows for human trafficking, drug trafficking, and — wait for it — gun smuggling. Now can you grasp that weaponry illegally brought into the country can and will end up in the wrong hands?

Sure you can! And you CARE SO MUCH, don't you? Then you ought to support President Trump and oppose the obstructionist Democrats who either want open borders or practically promote them via their Trump-hating obstructionism.

The Trump Steamroller

Conrad Black on Trump's enemies:

They are failing to make the distinction between Trump’s policies and his mannerisms. No serious person can dispute the president’s economic successes (especially the virtual elimination of unemployment and energy imports), his revival of a viable policy of nuclear nonproliferation, taking serious measures to stop mass illegal immigration, moving decisively to address dangerous disadvantages in some trading relationships, and shaping up the Western alliance from an association of freeloading beneficiaries of an American military guaranty. He is the first businessman to be president, and he engaged in a policy form of zero-based budgeting. The underlying premise for climate policy is unproved and almost certainly largely false; he scrapped it. The notion that the U.S. performed a service for international development and world harmonization by allowing the Mexicans, Chinese, and others to pick America’s pockets and export unemployment to the United States was false. He is scrapping that. The idea, cherished by Democratic politicians and Republican employers of low-skilled workers, that masses of people could swarm into the country undocumented, be exploited in the labor market, and not be counted anywhere, but still vote (Democratic) and use the welfare and education systems is an outrage. Trump is scrapping that, too. The country is tired of spending billions more every year on education to destroy freedom of expression in the university and produce ever-less-well-educated students in the unionized state school systems. He is attacking those problems, too.

It’s Guerilla Warfare

This excellent article explains why so many intelligent and decent people support Donald J. Trump.  It starts like this:

When my liberal friends and colleagues begin to explain to me why they imagine President Trump is appallingly vulgar and incompetent and venal, there is always a point in which their faces go blank. It happens when I say to them, “What about the Little Sisters of the Poor?” That stops them short. They don’t know the reference.

I could also mention Brendan Eich, Barronelle Stutzman, Amy Wax, or Bruce Gilley and get the same response. Liberals who are otherwise informed and well-educated are unfamiliar with those names. They followed the Robert Mueller investigation closely, they tally Trump’s misdeeds weekly, and they are anxious about 2020. But the episodes involving the individuals I cite don’t register with them.

Of Progressive Carnivores and Cannibals

Victor Davis Hanson.  Excerpt:

But revolutionary carnivores are rarely sated. Once they run out of easy hostile targets—and they have with the collapse of the Mueller hoax and all the other impeachment melodramas—they get hungry and as cannibals start to eye their own.

We have already seen that autophagy in the initial primary debates in which all the major Democratic presidential candidates—Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Robert O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—shouted out the most outlandish agendas possible in a desperate effort to ensure that no rival could possibly pose more to their left.

Poor, condemned Joe Biden renounced almost everything he once believed in and yet still was reduced metaphorically to screaming for his life on the guillotine stage that he was a revolutionary after all! Had Biden in his first debate only yelled back at his attacker, Harris, “If you really want the return of federally mandated busing of school children, then go out and run on busing and see where it gets you!”

Define or Drop

For leftists, words are weapons. If you are a lefty, and you disagree, then I invite you to define 'fascist,' 'racist,' 'white supremacist,' and the rest of the epithets in your arsenal. Define 'em or drop 'em.

Show us that you are people of good will.

Suppose I point out the incompatibility of Sharia with Western values and you call me an 'Islamophobe.' You thereby demonstrate that you are not a person of good will.  A person of good will does not dismiss the arguments of his rational interlocutor as driven by a phobia.  Here is a good illustration of what I mean when I say that for leftists, words are weapons, or as I also like to say, "semantic bludgeons."

Although conservatives are far less offensive in this regard, they too must be held to the standard of define or drop.

There were those who called Obama a socialist. But there can be no reasonable discussion of whether he is or isn't without a preliminary clarification of the term.  If a socialist is one who advocates the collective or government ownership of the means of production, then I know of no statement of Obama's in which he advocated any such thing.

Am I being soft on one of the worst presidents in American history? No, I am just being fair.

The Ashtray Has Landed: Errol Morris versus Thomas Kuhn

Talk of philosophy being a blood sport is usually and rightly metaphorical. But on occasion, actual weapons are brandished even if not deployed. You will recall Wittgenstein's poker. But perhaps you haven't yet heard of Thomas Kuhn's ashtray.   Curiously, pokers and ashtrays have something to do with fire and smoke, devilish elements.  A philosopher's devil, say I, is his own ego.

Philip Kitcher: 

Almost half a century ago, as a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin fascinated by the history of science, the young Morris was rejected by some of the most prestigious graduate departments. Thanks to the efforts of one of the field’s major stars, Thomas Kuhn, he did eventually find his way to Princeton’s program in the history and philosophy of science. But his time there did not go smoothly. Matters came to a head in a one-on-one discussion of a paper he had written for Kuhn’s seminar. The emotional temperature rose. And then rose some more, until the tête-à-tête was ultimately punctuated by an overflowing ashtray. Launched from Kuhn’s hand, the ashtray hurtled across the room.

Read the rest.

Kuhn ashtray

Dennis Miller on Obama, and the Art of the Verbal Counterpunch

(This is a repost, slightly redacted, from 9 October 2014.)

Last night on The O'Reilly Factor, the sharpest comedian out there uncorked the following:

He makes Narcissus look like he invented self-effacement.

In battling the Left, it is not enough to have facts, logic, and moral decency on one's side; one must turn the Left's Alinskyite tactics against them by the use of mockery, derision, contumely, and all the weapons of invective to make them look stupid, contemptible, and uncool.

For the young especially, the cool counts for far more than the cogent. 

This is why the quintessentially cool Miller is so effective.  People of sense could see from the outset that the adjunct law professor and community organizer, associate of  former terrorist Bill Ayers and the 'reverend' Jeremiah Wright, raised on leftist claptrap and bereft of experience and knowledge of the world, would prove to be a disaster as president — as he has so proven, and as even Leon Panetta the other night all but admitted. 

But Obama came across as one cool dude and that endeared him to foolish voters. 

Civility is a prized conservative virtue, and one wishes that such verbal tactics would not be necessary.  But for leftists politics is war, and it is the foolish conservative who fails to see this and persists in imagining it to be a gentlemanly debate on common ground over shared interests.  Civility is for the civil, not for its enemies.

Some time ago I heard Miller quip, in reference to Melissa Harris-Perry, that

She is a waste of a good hyphen.

A nasty thing to say, no doubt, but not as nasty as the slanderous and delusional things she had to say about the supposedly racist overtones of the word 'Obamacare.'

Conservatives should not allow themselves to be hobbled by their own civility and high standards.  As one of my aphorisms has it:

Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.

And I don't mean that merely on the verbal level.

The Main Thing is to be Polite: Or So Rod Dreher Seems to Think

As you may have gathered, I have a high opinion of Rod Dreher.  A friend and I are currently working through his The Benedict Option. But the scent of Never-Trumpery is large about him. His Trump Summons Demons begins as follows:

Tonight at a rally in North Carolina, the President of the United States criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, which he is certainly entitled to do. But listen to the crowd: “Send her back! Send her back!” Did he try to stop them? Of course not.

Where does he think this is all going to go? This is horrifying. Republican members of Congress need to stand up right now and say that this is unacceptable behavior in a president, whipping up a mob like this.

Dreher adds:

There are things worse than a president who is radically pro-abortion, opposed to religious liberty, and favoring open borders. It’s having a president who recklessly endangers the lives of people for the sake of winding up a mob.

A perspicacious comment by one 'Seoulite':

Future scholars: these sentences exemplify the "Polite Conservative" . . . . According to the Polite Conservative, someone who actively supports the annual murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings (radically pro-abortion), the punitive imposition of radical progressivism and the trouncing of freedom of conscience in the public space (religious liberty), and the actual destruction of the nation itself (open borders); such a person is preferable to someone who insults the Polite Conservative's sense of decorum and acceptable discourse.

Above all one must be polite and courteous, even as an invited guest insults you in your own house, even as uninvited guests smash the windows and clamber in, even as the house itself burns and knives are at your children's throats, you must be polite and not wind anybody up.

Could I have said it better? I doubt it. But that this intelligent person fears to appear under his real name says something about the state we are in and the nature of our enemies.

Dreher Benedict


What’s Wrong with Cultural Appropriation?

Is acting white cultural appropriation? No doubt, but what's wrong with that? What's wrong with cultural appropriation?

I culturally appropriate every day from the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews. Why shouldn't blacks borrow from and make use of the products of white culture?

I also appropriate culturally from the Jews who play the blues, who themselves 'culturally appropriated' the blues from black bluesmen. Mike Bloomfield, for example, not only appropriates, respectfully and gratefully, from the likes of B. B. King, but improves and outplays many of the originators as in Carmelita's Skiffle and Albert's Shuffle.  Call me a racist! Call me a Jew lover!

I appropriated 'p.c.-whipped' from Ed Feser. Where did he get it? No idea: maybe he coined it.  Maybe he 'appropriated' it. Heavens!

My Italian mother culturally appropriated the English language when she was ten years old. Later, she taught it to me. So I am a language appropriator at one remove.  How dare an Italian learn the English language? Doesn't it belong to the English? Don't they own it?

The early Christians culturally appropriated Greek philosophy in order to articulate and defend their worldview. And it's a good thing they did; else we wouldn't be talking about it.

And what is our entire philosophical tradition if not a series of cultural appropriations from the Greeks, and Plato in particular?

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.  I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.  I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.  [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

I could go on. But you get the point unless you are either stupid or a liberal.  Is there any content to the latter disjunction? Or is it like 'firefly or glow bug'?

Catholics Defending Communists!?

Hats off to Rod Dreher for condemning the Jesuit magazine America for publishing an article defending commies.  Excerpt:

Wait a minute. No fair-minded and intellectually curious person could object to an essay in a Catholic magazine criticizing the excesses of capitalism. It’s also easy to see the justification for publishing an essay defending democratic socialism from a Catholic point of view. And nobody could reasonably complain about an essay like Dorothy Day wrote in 1933, explaining why some idealists are drawn to Communism.

But an essay defending Communism? Really? What to make of this?

My own views are very strong. A couple of weeks ago, I knelt in Warsaw at the grave of the Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity labor union movement. He was beaten to death by agents of the Communist government for opposing them. This is what Communists did to Father Jerzy:

So yes, in Poland, Communism and the Catholic Church had a “complicated” relationship.