Civilization is thin ice. Stomp around on it in your Antifa thug boots and all hell may break loose.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Ostrich Presentism
The following remark in Wittgenstein's Zettel seems to fit my sparring partner, Bad Ostrich, to a T.
456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems." (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.
Here is a problem, or rather a question, that seems genuine and 'deep.' Do only present items exist, or do wholly past and wholly future items also exist? For this question to make sense, 'exist' in both occurrences cannot be in the present tense. If it were, 'Only present items exist' would be logically true and 'Past and present and future items all exist' would be logically false. The presentist claim would then be non-substantive (trivial), and the 'eternalist' claim would be substantive, but necessarily false.
Well, maybe the question just doesn't make sense. This seems to be the Ostrich's view. He seems to think that logical as opposed to metaphysical presentism is the only game in town: 'Only the present exists' is susceptible of only one reading, the logical reading, whereas I think it is susceptible of two readings, the logical one and a metaphysical one. In one of his earlier comments, the Ostrich writes:
He [the logical presentist] is putting forward not a substantive metaphysical thesis, but rather a substantive thesis about language, a thesis about the meaning of ‘exists’ and ‘at present’.
The thesis, I take it, is that 'exists' can only be used correctly in the present-tensed way. If so, 'Boethius exists' is nonsense, if it is a stand-alone, as opposed to an embedded, sentence. ('It was the case that Boethius exists' is not nonsense.) In other words, 'exists' has no correct tenseless use.
Now if there are timeless entities, then 'exists' can be used both tenselessly and correctly. But I expect the Ostrich will have no truck with the timeless. His claim will then presumably be that 'exists' has no correct tenseless use in respect of any temporal item, and that temporal items are the only ones on offer.
What about the disjunctively omnitemporal use that I have already explained? Surely it is true to say that Boethius exists in that he either existed or exists or will exist, where each disjunct is tensed. This is true because the first disjunct is true. The Ostrich could say that the disjunctively omnitemporal use is not genuinely tenseless since it is parasitic upon tensed expresssions.
The Ostrich bids us consider
. . . the question of whether a thing could exist without existing in the present. The logical presentist might then question what is meant by ‘no longer exists’. The natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But then the thing doesn’t exist, period.
Using tensed language we can say, truly, that Boethius existed, but does not exist. Why not be satisfied with this?
The past-tensed 'Boethius existed' is true. It is true now. What makes it true? The Ostrich will presumably say that nothing makes it true, and there is no need for anything to make it true; it is just true! I expect the Ostrich to adopt A. N. Prior's redundancy theory of the present according to which everything that is presently true is simply true. (Cf. C. Bourne, 2006, 42 f.) Just as 'It is true that ____' is redundant. 'It is now the case that ___' is redundant.
For Prior, all tensed sentences are present-tensed. Thus the past-tensed 'Boethius existed' MEANS that it is now the case that Boethius existed. Given the redundancy of 'It is now the case that ____,' we are left with 'Boethius existed.' And that is all! There is no need or room for a metaphysics of time. There is nothing more to say about the nature of time than what is said in a perspicuous tense logic.
Thus the Ostrich. I am not satisfied. Past-tensed contingent truths need truth-makers. 'BV exists' is true. It can't just be true. It needs a truth-maker. A plausible candidate is the 200 lb animal who wears my clothes. It will be the case that BV no longer exists. When that time comes, 'BV existed' will be true. If 'BV exists' needs a truth-maker, then so will 'BV existed.'
As with BV, so with Boethius.
If 'Boethius existed' needs a truth-maker, and nothing at present can serve as truth-maker, then the pressure is on to resist the Ostrich thesis that 'exists' can only be correctly used in the present-tensed way.
A Mormon De-Conversion
I have a category called Conversions. De-conversions are equally interesting. Here Spencer Case tells his story.
If memory and the engines of search serve, I have written only two extended entries on Mormonism, both of which mention our old friend Spencer.
Religion and Anthropomorphism with an Oblique Reference to Mormonism
Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil
A Catholic reader of this blog is deeply troubled by the problem of animal suffering. He reports his painful recollection of a YouTube video that depicts
. . . the killing of a baby elephant by 13 lions. They first attacked the little elephant in the open, but he was saved when several water buffalo intervened and drove the lions off. The baby then ran to two large bull elephants nearby, but rather than protecting him from the lions, they were indifferent. The lions, seeing this, rushed the baby, which helplessly ran off into the bush, where the lions, 13 in all, caught him, and began to devour him. You probably know that because of an elephant’s trunk, a lion’s bite to the neck does not kill, so I assume that the baby was eaten alive.
I find the thought of this killing and the myriad other killings like it very hard to accept. How does a theist explain such acts in nature? I know something of the various theodicies and defenses of theistic philosophers, but when confronted with this scene of terror and horrendous death, I find them all unconvincing. Something in the depths of my being rejects them all as over-sophisticated attempts to mask what is truly terrible so as to defend at all costs the first of Hume’s four options, that of a perfectly good first cause. I am not saying that I am abandoning my theistic beliefs, but I think that for too long, theists have not taken the matter of animal pain and suffering seriously enough.
Leaving philosophic theism aside, there is glaring indifference to this matter in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where the fixation on humanity’s fall, faults, and need for salvation. Without denying whatever truth may be found in this long theological reflection on human misery, what of the animals, those here millions of years before man walked on the earth, and all those who have shared and do share the earth with him? (Your posts on animal sentience, from which I have greatly profited, form part of the background to this question.)
[. . .] You often speak of choosing, and I agree that we must choose what we believe, but there is something at the very heart of reality that undermines our choices, and we find ourselves, if we are honest, doubting what we have chosen and thrown back on uncertainty, or if perhaps less honest and more fearful, falling into elaborate intellectual defenses to fend off what is unpalatable. As I wrote to you last year, I still believe that our ignorance is perhaps the greatest evil that we must confront.
Again, I had to share this with you, since I have no one here who would understand what is troubling me . . .
The horrors of nature "red in tooth and claw" cannot be denied. Sensitive souls have been driven by their contemplation to the depths of pessimism and anti-natalism. (See my Anti-natalism and Benatar categories). The notion that this awful world could be the creation of an all-powerful and loving deity who providentially cares about his creatures can strike one as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable. As my old atheist friend Quentin Smith once put it to me, "If you were God, would you have created this world?" To express it in the form of an understatement, a world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, and must do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged. If you were the architect of the world, would you design it as a slaughter house?
If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might help with the existential-psychological problem. I will now suggest how a theist who is also inclined toward skepticism can find some peace of mind.
Here is an argument from evil:
Theological Premise: Necessarily, if there is a God, there are no pointless evils.
Empirical Premise: There are pointless evils.
Conclusion: There is no God.
A pointless evil is one that is unjustified or gratuitous. Suppose there is an evil that is necessary for a greater good. God could allow such an evil without prejudice to his omnibenevolence. So it it not the case that evils as such tell against the existence of God, but only pointless evils.
Now the lions' eating alive of the baby elephant would seem to be a pointless evil: why couldn't an omnipotent God have created a world in which all animals are herbivores?
But — and here the skeptic inserts his blade — how do we know this? in general, how do we know that the empirical premise is true? Even if it is obvious that an event is evil, it is not obvious that it is pointlessly evil. One can also ask, more radically, whether it is empirically obvious that an event is evil. It is empirically obvious to me that the savagery of nature is not to my liking, nor to the liking of the animals being savaged, but it does not follow that said savagery is objectively evil. But if an event or state of affairs is not objectively evil, then it cannot be objectively pointlessly evil.
So how do we know that the so-called empirical premise above is true or even empirical? Do we just see or intuit that an instance of animal savagery is both evil and pointless? Suppose St. Paul tells us (Romans 1:18-20) that one can just see that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the the things that have been made, and that therefore atheism is morally culpable! I say: Sorry, sir, but you cannot read off the createdness-by-God of nature from its empirical attributes. Createdness is not an empirical attribute; it is an ontological status. But neither is being evil or being pointlessly evil.
So both the theist and the atheist make it too easy for themselves when they appeal to some supposed empirical fact. We ought to be skeptical both about Paul's argument for God and the atheist's argument against God. Paul begs the question when he assumes that the natural world is a divine artifact. The atheist too begs the question when he assumes that all or some evils are pointless evils.
Will you say that the pointlessness of some evils is not a direct deliverance but an inference? From which proposition or propositions? From the proposition that these evils are inscrutable in the sense that we can discern no sufficient reasons for God's allowing them? But that is too flimsy a premise to allow such a weighty inference.
The dialectical lay of the land seems to be as follows. If there are pointless evils, then God does not exist, and if God exists, then there are no pointless evils. But we don't know that there are pointless evils, and so we are within our epistemic rights in continuing to affirm the existence of God. After all, we have a couple dozen good, but not compelling, arguments for the existence of God. One cannot prove the existence of God. By the same token, one cannot prove the nonexistence of God. One can bluster, of course, and one can beg the question. And one can do this both as a theist and as an atheist. But if you are intellectually honest, you will agree with me that there are no proofs and no objective certainties in these sublunary precincts.
This is why I say that, in the end, one must decide what one will believe and how one will live. And of course belief and action go together: what one believes informs how one lives, and how one lives shows what one believes. If I believe in God and the soul, then those beliefs will be attested in my behavior, and if I live as if God and the soul are real, then that is what it is to believe these things.
If you seek objective certainty in these matters, you will not find it. That is why free decision comes into it. But there is nothing willful about the decision since years of examination of arguments and counterarguments are behind it all. The investigation must continue if the faith is to be authentic. Again, there is no objective certainty in this life. There is only subjective certainty which many people confuse with objective certainty. We don't KNOW. This, our deep ignorance, is another aspect of the problem of evil.
Making these assertions, I do not make them dogmatically. I make them tentatively and I expose them to ongoing investigation. In this life we are in statu viae: we are ever on the road. If rest there is, it is at the end of the road.
My correspondent seems to think that I think that deciding what to believe and how to live generates objective certainty. That is not my view. There is no objective certainty here below. It lies on the Other Side if it lies anywhere. And there is no objective certainty here below that there is anything beyond the grave. One simply has to accept that one is in a Cave-like condition, to allude to Plato's great allegory, and that, while one is not entirely in the dark, one is not entirely in the light either, but is muddling around in a chiaroscuro of ignorance and insight.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sounds of the Southwest
Calexico, Alone Again Or
A great cover of Love's version from '67.
Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas
Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go
A curiously satisfying Tex-Mex re-do of the old Jim Reeves crossover hit
Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses
Spade Cooley, Detour
'Spade Cooley' has got to be one of the most politically incorrect names of all time. I remember seeing his Western swing show on KTLA, Channel 5, in the late '50s, early '60s' at my Uncle Ray's place. Cooley was a real piece of work.
Above, a view of the Arizona open road from the cockpit of my 2013 Jeep Wrangler.
Old Crow Medicine Show, Sweet Amarillo. Dylan wrote it.
Marty Robbins messes with the wicked Felina in El Paso and comes to an untimely end.
Dean Martin is down and out in Houston.
A lonely soldier cleans his gun and dreams of Galveston.
A slacker standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona spies a girl in a flatbed Ford.
Johnny Rivers heads East via Phoenix and Albuquerque.
From Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah, this sojourner of the American night has driven every kind of rig that's ever been made.
Ed Farrell writes, "The Little Feat version of I'm Willin is a good one. But my favorite version will probably remain the one done by Seatrain circa 1970–which was the standard road song for Sierra climbing trips in late high school/college. Seatrain never really took off as a band but their musicianship was quite good though their style was difficult to pigeonhole."
That is a good version, indeed better than Little Feat's. There were a lot of great bands back in the day that never really made it. Another is Fever Tree. I remember hearing them circa '68 live at a club called The Kaleidoscope in Hollywood or West L. A. Give a careful listen to The Sun Also Rises.
Ed also recommends Seatrain's version of the Carole King composition, Creepin' Midnight. Produced by George Martin.
Finally, please take a look at Ed's spectacular photography.
Two Senses of ‘Tenseless’
The first sense I mention only to set aside. Timeless entities, if there are any, exist tenselessly and have their intrinsic properties and some of their relational properties tenselessly. The 'exists' in '7 exists' is tenseless, and so is the 'is' in '7 is prime.' And please note that the tenselessness is not a result of a de-tensing operation or an abstraction from tense: the tenseless terms are inherently tenseless because the entity in question is inherently timeless. So far, no problem. Talk of tenselessness with respect to timeless entities, if any, is wholly intelligible.
Problems arise when we ask whether temporal objects, items in time, can be intelligibly described as tenselessly existing or tenselessly propertied. Is it intelligible to say that Boethius tenselessly exists and is tenselessly a philosopher? In one sense it is; but the sense in which it is gives no aid and comfort to presentism. That is what I will rehearse in this post.
TENSELESSNESS AS DISJUNCTIVE OMNITEMPORALITY
We consider the disjunctively omnitemporal sense according to which 'x tenselessly exists' means 'x existed or x exists or x will exist' where each disjunct is tensed, and 'x is tenselessly F' means that 'x was F or x is F or x will be F' where each disjunct is tensed. This sense of 'tenseless' is not properly tenseless: tensed expressions must be used to formulate it. But while improper, it is has the virtue of being wholly intelligible. Thus Julius Caesar tenselessly exists in the disjunctively omnitemporal sense in that he either existed, or exists (present tense), or will exist. He tenselessly exists because the first of these tensed disjuncts is true. When we say that he tenselessly exists we are simply abstracting from when he existed. We are leaving the 'when' out of consideration. We are not thereby attributing to the man some non-disjunctive property of tenseless existence, whatever that might be.
And similarly with 'Julius Caesar is a Roman emperor.' We all understand the sentence to be true despite Caesar's having ceased to exist long ago. We take the sentence to be tenselessly true because we read the copula in the disjunctively omnitemporal sense. The same goes for 'Hume is an empiricist,' a sentence one might find in a history of philosophy. Although Hume does not now exist, we can say, intelligibly, that he IS an empiricist because we are using 'is' in a disjunctive omnitemporal way.
DOES DISJUNCTIVELY OMNITEMPORAL TENSELESSNESS HELP US UNDERSTAND THE PRESENTIST V. ETERNALIST DEBATE?
Unfortunately, it doesn't. The presentist tells us that only present items exist, whereas the eternalist says that past, present, and future items all exist. To engage each other they have to be using 'exist' in the same sense: their disagreement is predicated upon an agreement as to the sense of 'exists.' Now it it is clear that this cannot be the present-tensed sense of 'exists.' Nor can it be the timelessly tenseless sense of 'exists.' And not the disjunctively omnitemporal sense either. Why not?
Everyone agrees that Boethius no longer exists. But 'no longer exists' can be understood in two ways. The eternalist (B-eternalist) holds that what no longer exists exists all right, but in the past. The presentist, however, holds that what no longer exists does not exist. For the eternalist, Boethius tenselessly exists. For the presentist, Boethius does not tenselessly exist. Therefore, for the presentist, it is not the case that Boethius either did exist or does exist or will exist. But this is plainly false, since Boethius did exist. Therefore, the sense of 'exists' that allows presentist and eternalist to engage each other cannot be the disjunctively omnitemporal sense of 'tenseless.'
So what the hell sense of 'tenseless' is it?
More later. It's Saturday night. Time for a stiff one and Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies.
What, Me Worry?
The evil event will either occur or it will not. If it occurs, and one worries beforehand, then one suffers twice, from the event and from the worry. If the evil event does not occur, and one worries beforehand, one suffers once, but needlessly. If the event does not occur, and one does not worry beforehand, then one suffers not at all. Therefore, worry is irrational. Don't worry, be happy.
Am I saying that that one ought not take reasonable precautions and exercise what is pleonastically called 'due diligence'? Of course not. Rational concern is not worry. I never drive without my seat belt fastened. Never! But I have never been in an accident and I never worry about it. And if one day it happens, I will suffer only once: from the accident.
Worry is a worthless emotion, a wastebasket emotion. So self-apply some cognitive therapy and send it packing. You say you can't help but worry? Then I say you are making no attempt to get your mind under control. It's your mind, control it! It's within your power. Suppose what I have just said is false. No matter: it is useful to believe it. The proof is in the pragmatics.
We Lesser Lights
The great thinkers think for humanity, and the great writers write for humanity. The great teachers are teachers of humanity. Buddha was such a one and so were Jesus and Socrates. We lesser lights think and write to clear our heads, and to appropriate what we have inherited.
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!What from your fathers you received as heir,Acquire if you would possess it.(Goethe's Faust, Part I, Night, lines 684-685, tr. W. Kaufmann)
We think and write to know our own minds, to form our minds, and attract a few of the like-minded. As Aristotle says somewhere, we philosophize best with friends. Philosophy does not make progress in us so much as we make progress in philosophy. We are teachers of humanity only at second-hand, and only to a few. But we too participate in the great tradition and are grateful for the vocation to such participation.
“Only the Present Exists”
The above title gives the gist of presentism in the philosophy of time. It is an answer to Quine's ontological inventory question: What is there? What, by category, should we count as existent? The presentist answer is that only (temporally) present items exist: wholly past and wholly future items do not exist. Among these items are times, events, processes, individual substances, property-instantiations.
'Only the present exists' is doubly ambiguous.
FIRST AMBIGUITY
It is first of all ambiguous as between a tautology and a substantive thesis. It depends on how one construes 'exists.' Is it present-tensed? Then we get a tautology:
TAUT: Only the present exists at present.
Presentists, however, are not in the business of retailing tautologies. They are out to advance a substantive and therefore non-tautological claim about what exists. But to do this, their characteristic thesis cannot sport a present-tensed use of 'exists.' So they have to say something like this:
SUBS: Only the present exists simpliciter.
But what does 'simpliciter' mean? One might take it to mean 'tenseless.' Thus
SUBS*: Only the present exists tenselessly.
That is not a tautology. One might reasonably object that (SUBS*) is false on the ground that there are (tenselessly) wholly past and wholly future items such as Julius Caesar, his assassination, and my death. That is what the so-called 'eternalists' maintain:
E: Past, present, and future items all exist tenselessly.
All existents are on a par in point of existence. All are equally real. Boethius exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do. It is just that he exists in the past. Now most eternalists are B-theorists. They accept the B-theory of time. And so they would say that 'past,' 'present,' and 'future' can and must be cashed out relationally in terms of the B-relations: earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with. Boethius exists in the past in that he tenselessly exists at times earlier than some reference time such as the time of my writing this sentence. He exists just as I do, but elsewhen. London is elsewhere relative to here, where I flourish, but is no less real than where I flourish. Gloomier, no doubt, but no less real.
The main thing for 'present' purposes is that presentism and eternalism are both substantive claims. Neither is a tautology and neither is a contradiction. Note also that if 'exists' in 'Past, present, and future items all exist' is read present-tensedly, then the sentence just mentioned would be a contradiction. We also note that to formulate either presentism or eternalism we must invoke a tenseless sense of 'exists.'
SECOND AMBIGUITY
Now we notice that 'Only the present exists' is also ambiguous as between
SPM: Only this present exists: there is (tenselessly) exactly one time, the present, at which everything (tenselessly) exists.
and
PP: Only the present present exists: there are (tenselessly) many times, and every time t is such that everything that exists exists (tenselessly) at t.
The first view is Solipsism of the Present Moment. This is a lunatic view, although it seems logically possible. It amounts to saying that everything that ever existed and everything that ever will exist exists now. Imagine that the entire universe, together with fossils, monuments, memories, and dusty books just now sprang into existence, lasts a while, and then collapses into non-being.
Presentism as usually understood affirms something like (PP), which implies that there are past presents, a present present, and future presents. The idea is that, at any given time, whether past, present, or future, all that exists is what exists at that time. If reality is the totality of what exists, (PP) implies that reality is always changing. (PP) implies that reality is 'dynamic' whereas (E) implies that it is static.
(PP) strikes me as problematic. (PP) implies that there are (tenselessly) many different times. But there cannot be (tenselessly) many times if at each time there is only what exists at that time. For if at each time there is only what exists at that time, then at each time there are no times other than that time. Is there a formulation of presentism that is consistent with its own truth? I suspect that there isn't.
Presentism is at present very popular among philosophers. I am wondering why. Some distinguished writers actually say that it is common sense. What? The proverbial man on the street has no opinion on any of these questions.
Will I Vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020?
Absolutely.
I didn't support Trump's nomination. In fact, I wrote many posts against it, one example here. But when Trump gained the Republican nomination, I realized that no serious conservative could fail to support him given the alternative. So I decided to roll the dice and encourage others to do so. The gist of my reasoning in two sentences: With Hillary, we know what we will get. With Trump, there is a good chance that we will get some of what conservatives want. Ergo, etc. A nice tight little enthymeme that I unpacked over many a post, e.g., in Catholics Must Support Trump.
What happened in the last two and one half years is that we conservatives got far, far more than we expected. The Orange Man is proving to be a great president:
. . . Trump has accomplished more in two years than his four immediate predecessors accomplished in four to eight years.
The economy is in the best shape in modern history. New and better trade agreements have been developed with the major economies. Our defense is much stronger, including a stronger and better funded NATO. Our principal adversaries — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — are more off-balance than they have been in decades. Each of them is tough and ruthless, but they see in Trump someone who understands them and is equally tough in defending his country. And, with the collapse of ObamaCare, Trump has a huge opportunity to advance an effective, market-based approach to American health care coverage and cost control to help everyone.
Belying the hysteria of the left, all Americans are moving forward; these are not “sad times,” and there is no “crisis.”
This raises the central question to be framed in the next election: What should we demand of our president? If we’re looking for dignity, manners, grace and orderliness, Trump is vulnerable. If we’re looking for strong leadership to provide real opportunity for economic advancement for all Americans and a strong defense of America and its interests, then Trump has a claim to greatness over his current opponents and his predecessors.
The weak field of Democrats presents voters with a virtual Hobson’s choice. It will be interesting to see how they choose.
So yes, I will vote for Trump in 2020.
Speaker Pelosi Defames Attorney General Barr
Nancy Pelosi, that mendacious tool of Democrat delusion and self-destruction, beclowns herself once again.
Frustrated that their Russian-Trump conspiracy narrative has gone up in smoke, Democrats are looking to hang an obstruction of justice charge around President Trump’s neck and are targeting Attorney General Barr as a convenient scapegoat for getting in their way. Speaker Pelosi’s accusation of criminal conduct against Mr. Barr is a desperate act that crosses the line into malicious falsehood of her own.
Speaker Pelosi followed the example of such lightweights on the Senate Judiciary Committee as Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who made the same charge Wednesday during Mr. Barr’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on which she sits. Senator Hirono followed up her baseless accusation with this bit of self-praise: "Please, Mr. Attorney General, give us some credit for knowing what the hell is going on around here with you." The only thing that Senator Hirono deserves “credit” for after her disgraceful performance during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and during Mr. Barr’s Wednesday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee is how easily she embarrasses herself.
Stealth-Jihad and the Hijab
After all the years that have passed since 9/11, many American still misunderstand the nature of the Islamic threat. The main way that Islamic power advances in the West is not through terror attacks, but through stealth-jihad—the slow-motion co-option of our cultural and political institutions.
[. . .]
Cultural battles are won—or lost—by cultural institutions. Most stealth jihadists don’t hope to impose sharia law through armed struggle, but rather through influence operations designed to enlist these institutions on their side. They already seem to have enlisted two major cultural institutions on their side—universities and media.
Many universities, for example, seem to have adopted a pro-hijab stance. Faculty and student groups present the hijab as a symbol of a woman’s right to choose—in this case, to choose what clothes she will wear. Thus, on International Hijab Day, students are encouraged to don the hijab in order to show solidarity with their Muslim sisters.
Having thus been primed to see the hijab as a symbol of choice and diversity, the typical college grad will have no difficulty understanding the decision by Fox News to suspend Judge Jeanine Pirro for her criticism of Representative Ilhan Omar’s wearing of the hijab. Pirro suggested that Omar’s hijab might be “indicative of her adherence to sharia law.” And that was enough to bring on the two week suspension.
Should Felons Have the Right to Vote?
Bernie Sanders thinks that felons should have the right to vote even while incarcerated. That is a foolish and irresponsible view.
1) Felons have shown by their destructive behavior that they cannot productively order their own lives. Why then should they have any say in the ordering of society? Why should the thoughtful vote of a decent, law-abiding citizen be canceled out by the vote of an armed robber, a rapist, a drug dealer, a terrorist, or any other miscreant? That could make sense only to someone who substituted feeling for thought.
Criminals have no interest in the common good; their concern is solely with their own gratification. They do not, as a group, contribute to society; they are, as a group, a drag on society. So I ask again: why should they be allowed to vote? And how many of them would even want to vote if they weren't given incentives by leftist activists?
I concede the following. Some 'felons' have been wrongly convicted. Some felonies should be misdemeanors. There are different classes of felonies. Some felons reform themselves and become productive members of society. But none of these concessions affects the main point, namely, that it is foolish and irresponsible to maintain that felons as a group should have the right to vote even while incarcerated.
2) Sanders:
. . . the right to vote is an inalienable and universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older. Period. As American citizens all of us are entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and all the other freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
By this logic, felons have the right to keep and bear arms even while incarcerated. After all, Second Amendment rights are "enshrined in our Bill of Rights." And they are "inalienable and universal." But of course, there are excellent reasons to deny felons the right to buy and own guns, and in particular the 'right' to pack heat while in prison! You would have to be insane to to think that an armed robber's right, qua citizen, to keep and bear arms is in no way affected by his history of armed robbery. Rights can be lost, limited, and forfeited. Rights cannot be coherently thought of as absolute and unexceptionable.
The right to free speech does not give a person the right to say absolutely anything in any context. There is no right to freedom of religion if your 'religion' involves human sacrifice. The right to freedom of assembly is limited by property rights. You have no right to assemble on my property without my permission. There is no right to block public thoroughfares or destroy public property. Individual property rights are limited by legitimate eminent domain considerations. Eminent domain laws have been misused, but that is no argument against them in principle.
But doesn't capital punishment violate the right to life? Capital punishment does not involve a violation of a citizen's right to life: the murderer or anyone who commits a capital crime forfeits his right to life by committing a capital crime. If I use deadly force against you in a self-defense situation in which you threaten my life, and in so doing cause your death, I have done something both morally and legally permissible. It follows that I haven't violated your right to life. Rights violations are by definition impermissible. By your action, you have forfeited your right to life.
Sanders tells us that the right to vote is a "universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older." But if it were truly universal, then children should allowed to vote. Why the restriction to 18 years and older? Nancy Pelosi recently maintained that the voting age should be lowered to 16 so as to involve young people in politics. But why 16 and not 14? Think of how many more young people would be involved in politics if the voting age were reduced to 10. The stupidity of this is obvious and the motive behind it is transparent.
3) Sanders on voter suppression:
Indeed, our present-day crisis of mass incarceration has become a tool of voter suppression. Today, over 4.5 million Americans — disproportionately people of color — have lost their right to vote because they have served time in jail or prison for a felony conviction.It goes without saying that someone who commits a serious crime must pay his or her debt to society. But punishment for a crime, or keeping dangerous people behind bars, does not cause people to lose their rights to citizenship. It should not cause them to lose their right to vote.
It is true that a person who is justly incarcerated does not cease to be a citizen. But it hardly follows that he retains every right of a citizen. To underscore the obvious, the prisoner is not free to come and go as he pleases. He is not immune to searches and seizures. Etc. Limitation and suspension of rights is part of the punishment.
And then we have the obfuscatory leftist talk of 'voter suppression' and 'mass incarceration.' One does not suppress the vote of illegal aliens; they have no right to vote in the first place. Similarly, one does not suppress the vote of felons; they have no right to vote.
Sanders apparently thinks that 'people of color' are the victims of voter suppression because they are disproportionately represented among the prison population. The suggestion is that they are incarcerated to keep them from voting. Nonsense. They are disproportionately incarcerated because they are disproportionately involved in criminal behavior.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ohio Songs
Today being the 49th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, we kick things off with
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Ohio This one goes out to my old Ohio friend, Bill Marvin who attended Kent State.
Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, The Banks of the Ohio
Joan Baez with Jerry Garcia, The Banks of the Ohio, 1981
Phil Ochs, Boy in Ohio, 1970. Underrated and largely forgotten, but not by this '60s veteran. Rest in peace, Phil.
Randy Newman, Dayton, Ohio 1903
Bruce Springsteen, Youngstown
Randy Newman, Burn On. An allusion to the Cuyahoga River catching on fire?
The Band, Look Out Cleveland
Ian Hunter, Cleveland Rocks
Maverick Philosopher 15th Anniversary Celebration and Renewal of Vows
Today is my 15th 'blogiversary.' I look forward to tomorrow and the start of Year 16. Operations commenced on 4 May 2004.
Can you say cacoethes scribendi?
I've missed only a few days in these fifteen years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.' Blogging for me is like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and playing the guitar and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to. Some of us are just natural-born scribblers. We were always scribbling, on loose leaf, in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, in journals daily maintained. Maintaining a weblog is just an electronic extension of all of that.
Except that now I conduct my education in public. This has some disadvantages, but they are vastly outweighed by the advantages. I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, some in the flesh. You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't call forth spirits or at least snag some interesting fish. The occasional scum sucker and bottom feeder are no counterargument.
I thank you all for your patronage, sincerely, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. I have a big fat file of treasured fan mail that more than compensates me for my efforts.
I am proud to have inspired a number of you Internet quill-drivers. Some of you saw my offerings and thought to yourself, "I can do this too, and I can do it better!" And some of you have. I salute you.
And now some thoughts on this thing we call blogging.
In the early days of the blogosphere, over 18 years ago now, weblogs were mainly just 'filters' that sorted through the WWW's embarrassment of riches and provided links to sites the proprietor of the filter thought interesting and of reasonable quality. So in the early days one could garner traffic by being a linker as opposed to a thinker. Glenn Reynold's Instapundit, begun in August 2001, is a wildly successful blog that consists mainly of links. But there are plenty of linkage blogs now and no need for more, unless you carve out a special niche for yourself.
What I find interesting, and what I aim to provide, is a blend of original content and linkage delivered on a daily basis. As the old Latin saying has it, Nulla dies sine linea, "No day without a line." Adapted to this newfangled medium: "No day without a post." Weblogs are by definition frequently updated. So if you are not posting, say, at least once a week, you are not blogging. Actually, I find I need to restrain myself by limiting myself to two or three posts per day: otherwise good content scrolls into archival oblivion too quickly. Self-restraint, here as elsewhere, is difficult.
Here is my definition of 'weblog': A weblog is a frequently updated website consisting of posts or entries, usually short and succinct, arranged in reverse-chronological order, containing internal and off-site hyperlinks, and a utility allowing readers to comment on some if not all posts.
'Blog' is a contraction of 'weblog.' Therefore, to refer to a blog post as a blog is a mindless misuse of the term on a par with referring to an inning of a baseball game as a game, a chapter of a book as a book, an entry in a ledger as a ledger, etc. And while I'm on my terminological high horse: a comment on a post is not a post but a comment, and one who makes a comment is a commenter, not a commentator. A blogger is (typically) a commentator; his commenters are — commenters.
There are group blogs and individual blogs. Group blogs typically don't last long and for obvious reasons, an example being Left2Right. (Of interest: The Curious Demise of Left2Right.) Please don't refer to an individual blog as a 'personal' blog. Individual blogs can be as impersonal as you like.
I am surprised at how much traffic I get given the idiosyncratic blend I serve. This, the Typepad version of MavPhil, commenced on Halloween 2008. Since then the Typepad site has garnered over five million page views (5, 192, 776 to be exact as of 14:06 hours) which averages to 1,353.4 page views per day. Spikes sometimes reach as high as 20, 000 page views in a day. Total posts: 9, 216. Two years ago: 7,486. Total comments: 11, 394.
How did I get my site noticed? By being patient and providing fairly good content on a regular basis. I don't pander: I write what interests me whether or not it interests anyone else. Even so, patience pays off in the long run. I don't solicit links or do much to promote the site. I have turned down a few offers to run advertising. This is a labor of love. I don't do it for money. "Not that there is anything wrong with that." (Seinfeld)
Blogging is like physical exercise. If you are serious about it, it becomes a daily commitment and after a while it becomes unthinkable that one should stop until one is stopped by some form of physical or mental debilitation.
Would allowing comments on all posts increase readership? Probably, but having tried every option, I have decided the best set-up is the present one: allow comments on only some posts, and don't allow comments to appear until they have been moderated.
MY PLEDGE
You will never see advertising on this site. You will never see anything that jumps around in your visual field. You will not be assaulted with unwanted sounds. I will not beg for money with a 'tip jar.' This is a labor of love and I prize my independence.
I also pledge to continue the fight, day by day, month by month, year by year, against the hate-America, race-baiting, religion-bashing, liberty-destroying, Constitution-trashing, gun-grabbing, lying fascists of the Left. As long as health and eyesight hold out.
I will not pander to anyone, least of all the politically correct.
And I won't back down. Are you with me? Then show a little civil courage. Speak out. Exercise your constitutional rights. We are engaged in a battle for the soul of America and indeed for the soul of the West.