Another brilliant column by VDH. I am tempted to quote, but it's all good.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Scandal Erupts over Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior
More proof that 'liberals' are insane:
Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries.
A Plea to Conservative Bloggers
Please join me in promoting Prager U videos. They teach what isn't taught in the leftist seminaries that our so-called universities have become. And they are mercifully short, around five minutes in length. Do your bit.
Here is the man himself in Why Isn't Communism as Hated as Nazism?
Full Disclosure: I don't know Prager personally; I criticize him when he needs criticizing as for example here; he has not asked me to promote his efforts; everything I do on this site is pro bono in two senses: I am working for the Good, and I am working without pay.
Do Black Lives Matter?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am not now, and never have been, a Southerner, a redneck, a plantation owner, slave holder, apologist for slavery, Civil War re-enactor on the Confederate (or Union) side, racist, or white supremacist.
I condemn slavery as a grave moral evil. I also condemn abortion as a grave moral evil.
Holding that all lives matter, I hold that black lives matter, including unborn black lives.
The Left’s Biggest Challenge at the Moment . . .
. . . is to figure out a way to politicize Hurricane Harvey and blame Trump for it. Either him or the deplorable racist bigots who support him. I'm sure the race-baiting, totalitarian bastards will come up with something.
Maybe they can take a leaf from that great black leader Louis Farrakhan on Katrina:
In comments in 2005, Farrakhan stated that there was a 25-foot (7.6 m) hole under one of the key levees that failed in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. He implied that the levee's destruction was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the population of the largely black sections within the city. Farrakhan later said that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told him of the crater during a meeting in Dallas, Texas.[24] Farrakhan further claimed that the fact the levee broke the day after Hurricane Katrina is proof that the destruction of the levee was not a natural occurrence.
Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism
Shelby Steele on the racism racket.
After actual racist oppression of blacks was eliminated, the Left invented 'structural,' 'systemic,' or 'institutional' racism to keep the race hustle going. It was plain to objective investigators that the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown had nothing to do with race hatred. Those two brought about their own deaths by their own bad behavior. But since they happened to be black, the Left seized on their deaths as examples of the imaginary construct, 'structural racism.'
To Understand the Religious Sensibility . . .
. . . two books are essential: Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you, if they do not move you, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility.
"He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne. The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.
Let us suppose that you do not have the time or the stamina or the education to read Augustine's great book itself. Then I recommend to you on this, the feast day of St. Augustine, Peter Kreeft's I Burned for Your Peace: Augustine's Confessions Unpacked (Ignatius Press, 2016). It consists of key quotations with commentary by Kreeft.
But don't expect a high level of philosophical rigor. It is a work of popular apologetics by a master of that genre.
Kreeft's lack of philosophical rigor is illustrated by his view that "The refutation of this materialism is simple." (147)
For a long time Augustine struggled with the question of how there could be purely spiritual realities such as God and the soul. He was in the grip of a materialism according to which everything that is real must have a bodily nature and occupy space. But then he noticed that the mental acts by which we form bodily images are not themselves bodily images. My image of a cat, for example, has shape and color, but the mental act of imagination does not have shape and color. As Kreeft puts it:
The imagination cannot imagine itself. The understanding, however, can understand itself. We can have a concept of the act of conceiving, and we can also have a concept of the act of imagining. [. . .] The light of the projection machine must transcend the images it projects on the machine. A material image cannot create an image; only an immaterial soul can.
It is exceedingly strange that many otherwise intelligent philosophers today simply cannot see this point when they embrace a materialist "solution" to the mind-body problem." (148)
Now I reject materialism about the mind, but surely this is a dubious argument.
It is not obvious that there are mental acts, but let us suppose there are. So we distinguish the act of imagining a cat, from the object imagined, the cat. Now it must be granted that phenomenological reflection fails to note any physical or spatial feature in the act of imagining or in any act of any type. When we introspect the operations of our minds we find no evidence that they are brain processes. But lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. The lack of evidence that mental acts are material is not evidence that they are not material. It might be that mental acts are brain processes, but that we are unable to cognize them in their true nature. That they do not appear to be material does not prove that they are immaterial.
That's one problem. Second is that Kreeft moves immediately from the immateriality of mental acts to an immaterial soul substance as subject of these acts. That move needs to be mediated by argument.
How Did We Get to be So Proud?
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?
In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine."
So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.
Pride, result of the Fall, comes before a fall — into the grave.
Leftists Eat Their Own
That they eat each other alive is the only thing I like about them. Buon appetito! Here:
Even the ACLU has run afoul of the thought police. They are taking enormous heat for a tweet featuring a cute little girl with an American flag and a shirt bearing the message “Free Speech.” They’re guilty of promoting “white supremacy” because the girl is deplorably white. Naturally, they apologized profusely. (emphasis added.)
So the ACLU is not just a bunch of leftist shysters. They are a bunch of pussy-wussy leftist shysters. Michael Medved has referred to them as the "American Criminal Liars Union."
Related:
The Real Threat is the Orwellian Antifa
Please read this important article. Excerpt:
Yet, the media would have us believe that it is the white supremacist movement that is the real threat to our republic. Consider that most media estimates put the Antifa movement, largely built out of the “Occupy” movement of 2008-2010, at more than 200,000 members. The Southern Poverty Law Center, on the other hand, puts the number of Klu Klux Klan members at about 6,000 KKK …in a country of almost 330 million. But actions speak volumes compared to mere numbers.
The vandalized statue of Christopher Columbus? Antifa. The statue torn down in Charlotte, N.C.? Antifa. The violence in Charlottesville? Antifa. The violence in Seattle? Antifa. Not excusing the vile nature of the white supremacist protest, but it was a licensed march that remained comparatively nonviolent, albeit troubling, until, as one eyewitness described it, “It started raining balloons filled with urine, feces, paint, burning chemicals & boards with nails driven into them.”
[. . .]
Increasingly, the violence we are seeing on the streets is not the result of the alt-right movement, but of the Antifa movement imposing their views on our society: tearing down statues, burning the American flag, shutting down town hall meetings, destroying private property and looting. All of it tactical toward achieving the goals of destroying the American culture, society and economy. Never mind that the tactics are themselves the tactics of the fascist.
Yet, the likes of CNN and the New York Times and Washington Post spend much of their time touting the alt-right threat. Why? A couple of reasons. First, most mainstream media types are philosophically inclined toward anti-establishment organizations from the start; they see little wrong with crypto-fascist violence if the stated goals are in line with their own values systems.
A Christian Koan
Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.
The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.
Santa Monica and St. Monica
The California city is named after the Catholic saint, the mother of St. Augustine. Her feast day is today, 27 August.
Now bring before your mind all of the wonderful place-names of Christian provenience. Do we have a plan to stop the barbarians when they, as they inevitably will, begin defacing, destroying, and re-naming?
The Professor-Student ‘Non-Aggression Pact’
William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:
Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status. Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.
I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis. In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.' And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations. One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table. One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.
In an abdication of authority that part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it. I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it. So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.
Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)
The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers. The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions. My chairman at the time was an officious organization man who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness. Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places.
Is Jones a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers. This is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.
I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance. Here is a review.
George Neumayr
From his latest (emphasis added):
One of the arguments against Trump last year from critics ostensibly worried about the “integrity of conservatism” was that he would revert to Manhattanite liberalism. He hasn’t. But they have. They can be heard whining about his ban on cross-dressers and transsexuals in the military, his insufficient enthusiasm for Islamic migrants, and now his defense of Robert E. Lee.
Paul Ryan, deferring to the propaganda of the commissars, says Trump “messed up” with his post-Charlottesville remarks. Leave it to the stupid party to ratify the lies of the left. Trump said nothing untrue and has behaved far more honorably than his cowardly “conservative” critics. They joined the anti-Lee mob; he didn’t. Remember that the next time one of those critics clears his throat pompously about the “threat that Trump poses to the conservative movement.” Those who use that phrase the most advance it the least.
Neumayr punches effectively at the likes of Bozo de Blasio, Commissar Cuomo, Bret Stephens, and Bill 'Crack Up' Kristol.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Help
Before we get under way, a song in celebration of President Trump's pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. A stinging rebuke to Obama & Co. and their contempt for the rule of law.
Bobby Fuller Five, I Fought the Law and the Law Won
………………………..
Canned Heat, Help Me. Help me consolate my weary mind. I love that 'consolate.'
Johnny Cash, Help Me.
Beach Boys, Help Me, Rhonda
Hank Williams, I Can't Help it If I'm Still in Love with You. Linda Ronstadt's version is wonderful, but does it get the length of the great Patsy Cline's?
Ringo Starr, With a Little Help from My Friends
Elvis Presley, Can't Help Falling in Love
Highwaymen, Help Me Make it Through the Night
Joni Mitchell, Help Me
Hank Locklin, Please Help Me, I'm Falling
Here is Skeeter Davis' answer to Hank.