Author: Bill Vallicella

Are You a Right-Wing Extremist? Take this Test!

The following is from a Salon article. The enumeration is mine; I did, however, preserve the order of the bulleted list in the Salon piece. After each item you will find brief and not-so-brief commentary by your humble correspondent.

The XRW chart contains 20 examples of behavior which could indicate right-wing extremist values and suggest that a person is being radicalized into joining that dangerous movement.

Some of these warnings are:

1) Describe themselves as 'Patriots'

A patriot is one who loves his country.  Patriotism is a good thing, a virtue. Like any virtue, it is a mean between two extremes. One of the extremes is excessive love of one's country, while the other is a deficiency of love for one's country. The patriot's love of his country is ordinate, measured, within bounds.  The patriot is neither a chauvinist (jingoist) nor a neutralist. Both are anti-patriots. He loves his country with an ordinate love. He loves it and seeks its improvement, but not its "fundamental transformation." One does not love that which one wishes fundamentally to transform. One who does seek such a "fundamental transformation" is no patriot.   

2) Refers to Political Correctness as some left wing or communist plot.

Political Correctness does in fact originate with the Communist Party.

Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. To understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.

In her fascinating memoir, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (Oxford 1990), Healey mentions the tendency leftists have of purging one another on grounds of insufficient ideological purity: it is almost as if, for a leftist, one can never be too far left. Healey writes:

3) Describe multicultural towns as 'lost'

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. No comment.

4) Looks at opponents as 'Traitors'

Surely some of the political opponents of conservatives are traitors and are rightly viewed as such by us.  But not all. Some are stupid. Some are ignorant. Some simply lack life experience and knowledge of history. Some have been brain-washed, or to put it more mildly: ill-served by their supposed 'educators.' 

No 'extremity' here.

5) Use the term 'Islamofascism'

Well, Islam, a combined political-religious ideology, is in fact totalitarian. If one conflates fascism with totalitarianism, then 'Islamofascist' is an accurate descriptive term.  If so, it is not 'extreme.' The calm and measured Michael Medved, no extremist, used 'Islamofascist' some years back and so did I. I no longer use the term because I reserve 'fascism' for the political ideology of Benito Mussolini.

6) Make generalisations about Muslims and Jews

Generalize we must. There is no thinking without generalization. But one can generalize well and arrive at truths or generalize poorly and promulgate falsehoods.

True generalization: Most of the terrorist acts in recent decades have been perpetrated by Muslims. 

False generalization: All of the terrorist acts in recent decades have been perpetrated by Muslims.

True generalization: Jews as a group are more intelligent than blacks as a group.

False generalization: Jews for centuries have been murdering Christian children and using their blood in religious ceremonies. 

Clearly, there is nothing wrong or 'extreme' with generalizing about Muslims and Jews — and everything else — so long as one does it correctly with attention to fact.

7) Have XRW extreme group stickers or badges on clothing and personal items

What, for example, the MAGA logo on a hat?

8) Make inaccurate generalisations about 'the Left' or Government

I need an example of one of these 'inaccurate generalisations.' Everyone is, or ought to be, opposed to inaccurate generalizations. 

9) Talk of an impending racial conflict or 'Race War'

Who is talking about a 'race war'?  Examples needed. There is of course much talk nowadays about the possibility of a hot civil war, and some of this talk emanates from the race-baiting Left.

10) Threaten violence when losing an argument, although claiming that XRW groups protest peacefully

This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The threats of violence are mostly from the Left. Consider the threats against President Trump.

11) Become increasingly angry at perceived injustices or threats to so called 'National Identity'

This is another example of a deep lack of self-awareness on the part of leftists.  It is certainly rich to hear identity-political leftists complain about those who speak of national identity.  As a matter of fact, nations do have their own unique identities, and every nation has a right to preserve its identity. There is nothing 'extreme' about that.

Salon article here.

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your values and attitudes into others. We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name — can get your irenic ass killed.

Make Orwell Fiction Again

Orwell Fiction Again

This from Nancy Pelosi's website (emphasis added):

The Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2010, ensures that all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care and significantly reduces long-term health care costs. This historic legislation, in the league of Social Security and Medicare, will lead to healthier lives, while providing the American people with more liberty to pursue their hopes and dreams.

This is another good example of an Orwellian use of language.  Americans love liberty and so Pelosi, in an attempt to deceive, works 'liberty' into her statement,  advancing a claim of Orwellian absurdity, namely, that limitations on the liberty of individuals and private entities are in reality enhancements of liberty.

War is peace.   Slavery is freedom.  Less liberty is more liberty.  Dependence on government is self-reliance. Fascist thugs are anti-fascist. The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y.  

The Trick in Meditation

I had a good session on the black mat this morning from 2:55 to 3:35  ante meridian. When I went to the mat, I was riding high on the wild horse of the mind, and of course enjoying the ride as I always do.   But I reined in the beast within five minutes or so and slipped into one of the antechambers of quiescence where thoughts persist but at a slower pace and of a nobler sort. For example, "Who is thinking these thoughts?" "I am thinking these thoughts." "Who am I?" And then the thought arose: to identify the thinker of thoughts is to objectify that which, as the thinker of thoughts, cannot be objectified. Of course, THAT is just another thought: it is the thought of the irreducibly subjective, and thus nonobjectifiable ultimate subject of thinking. Just another bloody thought! And so still at a remove from the Source of thoughts. But then I slipped a little deeper down as these thoughts vanished. Next thing I knew I caught myself falling over. I had fallen asleep. This was about forty minutes into the session. And that brings me to my point.

The trick in meditation is to achieve cessation of all thoughts while remaining fully alert.  So you need to do two things: rein in the wild horse of the mind, and then abide in full alertness in the resultant mental quiet. 

But this is only the first stage in meditation proper.

Why are So Many Jews Democrats?

Paul Gottfried may have part of the explanation:

Most Jews dislike the Republican Party because they associate it with the idea of a Christian America. And since the 1960s, as Peter Novick exhaustively shows in The Holocaust in American Life, blame for the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews has shifted in both Jewish and non-Jewish accounts from Nazi pagans to white Christians. The Holocaust is now routinely—perhaps most starkly in a book by Daniel Goldhagen—placed at the doorstep of Christian civilization. In my view, this shift is based on reckless generalization and feeds into an unjustified Jewish hostility toward religious Christians. But it’s nonetheless convinced many Jews that even Christians who appear to be effusively philosemitic are really anti-Jewish. Democrats, meanwhile, are supposedly friendlier to Jews because they are cleansing public life of traditional biblical morality, most of which ironically comes from Hebrew Scripture. From 2016 to 2018, while the Trump administration was trying to hammer home that Democrats were unfriendly to Israel and, by implication, to American Jews, Jewish identification with the Democratic Party went from 71 percent to 79 percent.

Related: Paul Gottfried on Propositionalism

Race, Social Construction, and Lewontin’s Fallacy

I asked a correspondent what it means when leftists say that race is a social construct. Here is his response with my comments:

What do they even mean?  I wonder about that too.  What could it mean to say that race is a "social construct"?  Do they mean that there are no biological or ancestral differences at all between Whites and Blacks and Orientals?  That's just ridiculous — like saying there are no biological differences between human beings and gorillas. 

It is indeed ridiculous on the face of it. It's like saying that the difference between fish and mammals is a mere artifact of our conceptual decisions and classificatory activities. It implies that reality has no inherent structure or intelligibility; whatever intelligibility it has it acquires from us. But that is tantamount to saying that there is no reality. It is Kant gone wild: the Critical Philosophy without the Ding an sich and without an invariant categorial framework.

Here is perhaps the deepest metaphysical error of the Left: leftists deny that there is a reality antecedent to our classifications and conceptualizations. (V. I. Lenin was of course an exception.) Everything becomes a social-political construct. How convenient for identity-political totalitarians! The bird of reality can be carved up any way that suits the will to power of some interest group — because there is no bird to carve. Next stop: the Twilight Zone. Rachel Dolezal is black. Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Warren, a.k.a. Fauxcahontas, despite her contribution of a recipe for lobster bisque to Pow Wow Chow, that must-have cook book for the bien pensant, is the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Continuing in the alimentary mode, she is now anent her Presidential pretensions, 'toast.'

I think in most cases they don't mean anything much.  They haven't thought about it.  It's a smart-sounding phrase they picked up from PBS or from some half-wit university lecturer.  It's the kind of thing the bien pensant people say.  So they say it too.  And they know that, whatever it really means, it must be true and morally right to say it.  They know that only Nazis disagree.  I've talked to some educated intelligent Leftists who say stuff like this.  They usually just retreat to Lewontin's fallacy–more differences within races than between, and all of that.  Again, it seems they just don't want to think about it and they use these dumb phrases as a way to avoid thinking.  The dumb phrases change once in a while.  I guess in earlier decades we'd hear more about how "There is only one race, the human race".  But it may be a mistake to expect any clear or coherent meaning behind these propaganda phrases.  

That's right. You might think that those who inhabit academe would be critical thinkers; the truth, however, is that many if not most are all-too-ready to succumb to groupthink, whether to advance themselves career-wise, or to fit in and be accepted, or just because they lack the skeptical, scientific spirit.

Lewontin's Fallacy?

A. W. F. Edwards on Lewontin's Fallacy

Wikipedia on Lewontin's Fallacy

Neven Sesardic, Race: The Social Destruction of a Biological Concept

Plato’s Great Inversion

A rerun unredacted from February, 2014.  To the memory of John  Niemeyer  Findlay.

………………………………………

Our long-time friend Horace Jeffery Hodges kindly linked to and riffed upon my recent quotage of a bit of whimsicality from the second volume of J. N. Findlay's Gifford lectures.  So here's another Findlay quotation for Jeff's delectation, this time from Plato and Platonism: An Introduction (Times Books, 1978):

It is not here, we may note, our task to defend Plato's Great Inversion, the erection of instances into ontological appendages of Ideas rather than the other way round.  It is only our task to show what this inversion involves, and that it does dispose of many powerful arguments.  For despite much talk of the concretely real and of what we can hold in our hands, it is plain that nothing so much eludes us or evades us as the vanishing instances which surround us or which go on in us. Even our friends leave nothing in our hands or our minds,  but the characteristic patterns on which we can, alas, only ponder lovingly when as instances they are dead, and we ourselves and our whole life of care and achievement leave nothing behind but the general memory of what we did and were. (23)

My esteemed teacher's poetic prose may have got the better of him in that last sentence redolent as it is of an old man's nostalgia.  For it is not only Findlay's characteristic patterns once so amply instantiated here below that I now ponder lovingly, but the actual words he wrote, many of them printed, some of them hand-written, that strikingly singular voluminous flow of Baroque articulation so beautifully expressive of a wealth of thoughts. In his books, I have the man still, and presumably at his best, even if he himself, long dead as an instance, has made the transcensive move from the Cave's chiaroscuro to the limpid light wherein he now, something of a Platonic Form himself, beholds the forma formarum, the Form of all Forms.

You will be forgiven if you think my poetic prose has gotten the better of me.

J N Findlay seated