Author: Bill Vallicella

Trump Pardons Joe Arpaio

And conservatives cheer. Of course. Paul Mirengoff gets it right:

Arpaio was accused by the Obama Justice Department and other left-wingers of targeting Hispanics. Indeed, the legal case that led to his conviction arose from claims of racial profiling. But in Maricopa County, the illegal immigrant population is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Had the County been plagued by mass illegal immigration by Koreans, chances are Sheriff Joe would have targeted Asians. And he would have been right to do so. Sheriffs shouldn’t be expected to check their common sense at the door.

To be sure, the pardon of Arpaio is, at least in part, a political act by a president who campaigned on a tough-as-nails immigration policy and who received Arpaio’s backing. But there’s a pretty good argument that the prosecution of Arpaio was also political.

It was the highly politicized, left-wing Obama Justice Department that chose to prosecute Arpaio in connection with the hot button political issue of enforcing immigration laws. The judge whose order Arpaio defied apparently was satisfied with civil contempt. Team Obama went criminal on the octogenarian sheriff. And it did so, according to Arpaio’s lawyers, just two weeks before he stood for reelection.

The pardon thus can be said to represent a political end to a political case.

Some may defend the pardon by comparing it to egregious pardons of the past, like President Clinton’s pardon of wealthy fugitive Marc Rich and President Obama’s pardon of a Puerto Rican terrorist. Arguing form [from] these outliers strikes me as misguided. Their pardons were so flagrantly unjust that the same argument could be used to defend a great many indefensible pardons.

No such argument is required to defend Trump’s pardon of Arpaio. It was a reasonable exercise of the pardon power.

Clinton and Obama used the pardon power destructively, pardoning scumbags. Trump used it constructively, pardoning one who upheld the rule of law.

You say Arpaio is a racist? Do you understand that illegal aliens do not constitute a race?

But there is no point in addressing liberals with rational arguments. They don't inhabit the plane of reason. They will ignore your arguments and go right back to calling you a racist. They have found that that works, and they are out to win by any means.

Automotive Profiling

'Profiling' drives liberals crazy, which is a good reason to do more of it.  No day without political incorrectness.  Here is a form of profiling I engage in, and you should too.

You are on the freeway exercising due diligence.  You are not drunk or stoned or yapping on a cell phone.  You espy an automotively dubious vehicle up ahead, muddied, dented, with muffler about to fall off, and a mattress 'secured' to the roof. The vehicle is within its lane, but weaving.

Do you keep your distance?  If you are smart, you do.  But then you a profiling.  You are making a judgment as to the relative likelihood of that vehicle's being the cause of an accident.  You are inferring something about the sort of person that would be on the road in such a piece of junk.  Tail light out?  Then maybe brakes bad. Weaving? Then maybe texting or sexting.

I don't need to tell you motorcyclists how important automotive profiling is.

You are doing right.  You are engaging in automotive profiling.  You are pissing off liberals.  They will call you a racist, but keep it up and stay alive.  We need more of your kind.

Is Trump Divisive?

To say of Trump or anyone that he is divisive is to say that he promotes (political) division. But there is no need to promote it these days since we already have plenty of it. We are a deeply and perhaps irreparably divided nation.  So it is not right to say that Trump is divisive: he is standing on one side of an already existing divide.

Trump did not create the divide between those who stand for the rule of law and oppose sanctuary cities, porous borders, and irresponsibly lax legal immigration policies.  What he did is take up these issues fearlessly, something his milque-toast colleagues could not bring themselves to do.  

And he has met with some success: illegal immigration is down some 50%. 

Liberals call him a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe. That they engage in this slander shows that the nation is bitterly divided over fundamental questions. 

Too often journalistic word-slingers shoot first and ask questions never. Wouldn't it be nice if they thought before their lemming-like and knee-jerk deployment of such adjectives as 'divisive'?

Language matters.

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Willie Horton Revisited

From William Voegeli, Liberals, Shipwrecked:

As a result, identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate. (emphasis added)

I have a confession to make. I voted for Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991.  But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.

One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them  to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle.  

Is there one Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this party of obstructionist crapweasels is bereft of moral sense. (I seem to be warming to my theme.) Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases. 

Willie Horton was one bad hombre.

Jordan Peterson on the Problem with Atheism

Earlier this evening I was watching Tucker Carlson. He had a psychology professor on whose YouTube videos had been blocked  by Google but then later unblocked. His name is Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. I had never heard of him, and his performance on Carlson's show was not particularly impressive.  Having viewed his The Problem with Atheism, however, I am now impressed! 

My finding of this video is serendipitous in that it ties in with a discussion I was having yesterday with Malcolm Pollack. Malcolm is a naturalist and atheist in the Dennett-Dawkins-Harris camp.  He seems to think that an objective, agreed-upon, and life-enhancing morality has no need of a transcendent foundation, and perhaps also that there is no need that the majority believe in any such transcendent foundation. In an earlier thread Malcolm wrote:

. . . one can accept the principle of equality before the law, based on a fundamental sense of shared humanity and liberty, merely as a stipulation, a premise one accepts because one thinks it leads to a just society, without belief in a transcendent foundation in God. It is simply a choice that a person, or a society, can make; we do that with all sorts of other premises and conventions.

I replied:

Can someone who emphasizes the biologically-based differences between groups and sees cultural differences percolating up out of those differences [justifiably] appeal to a "sense of shared humanity" sufficiently robust to support equality before the law?

It may be that the West is running on fumes, the last vapors of the Judeo-Christian worldview and that your sense of equal justice for all is but a vestige of that dying worldview. Can belief in that moral code survive when belief in a transcendent Ground thereof is lost? The death of God has consequences, as Nietzsche appreciated.

This is the question that Professor Peterson addresses with passion and skill and with a slam or two at Sam Harris. (3:03) Peterson's point is essentially the one that Nietzsche made: belief in and respect for the authority  of Christian morality stands and falls with belief in the Christian God.  The death of God-belief in the West among the educated classes leads inevitably to moral nihilism.  

Malcolm thinks we needn't drag the Transcendent into it; we can just agree on some set of moral conventions that will guide us.  Sounds utopian to me. We don't agree on anything anymore: so how can we agree on this?  Because it would be the rational thing to do to insure human flourishing?

But why should one care about the flourishing of anyone outside of oneself and one's tribe? Peterson raises the question of why it would be irrational, say, to exploit others for one's use and enjoyment.  Why is it irrational for the strong to enslave the weak?  How is pure naked self-interest irrational, Peterson asks. (3:53)

Your move, Malcolm.

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At Funerals

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going home to the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? He who loves the things of this world as if they are ultimate realities ought perhaps to hope that death is annihilation.

Liberalism-Leftism as a Cognitive Aberration

Each day's newsfeed brings another dozen or so examples of how libs and lefties are losing their collective marbles and earning their epithets libtard and leftard.  Here is just one recent example for your astonishment:

It was a story too dumb to be real: reports yesterday emerged from ESPN critic Clay Travis at Outkick the Coverage that ESPN had pulled an Asian announcer named Robert Lee off a University of Virginia college football game to avoid offending idiots. I have to admit, I didn’t think it could be true. How unbelievably stupid do you have to be to think that someone whose name is similar to a Confederate general – albeit absent the all-important middle initial – would lead to triggering and upset viewers if he called a Charlottesville-based sporting event.

Please pray for these sick puppies.  Unfortunately, many of them are not just sick but vicious to boot which suggests that harsher treatments may be called for.

Another Uncompelling Argument in Illustration of Our Pascalian Predicament

This relates to my earlier discussion with Dr. Novak. See articles referenced infra. A reader thinks the following syllogism establishes its conclusion:

a) What doesn't have necessity from itself is caused;

b) The contingent does not have necessity from itself;

Ergo

c) The contingent is caused.

An argument establishes its conclusion just in case: (i) the argument is deductive; (ii) the argument is valid in point of logical form; (iii) the premises are all of them objectively certain. Establish is a very strong word; it is as strong as, and equivalent to, prove.

The argument above is a valid deductive argument, and the minor is true by definition. The major, however, is not objectively certain. In fact, it is not even true. The impossible doesn't have necessity from itself, but it has no cause since it doesn't exist.

But a repair is easily made. Substitute for (a)

a*) Whatever exists, but does not have necessity from itself, is caused.

Then the argument, for all we know, might be sound. But it still does not establish its conclusion.  For the major, even if true, is not objectively certain.  Ask yourself:

Is the negation of the repaired major a formal-logical contradiction? No. Is it an analytic proposition? No. Does it glow with the light of Cartesian self-evidence like 'I seem to see a tree' or 'I feel nauseous'? No.

So how can Novak & Co. be objectively certain that (a*) is true?  This proposition purports to be about objective reality; it purports to move us beyond logical forms, concepts, and mental states. Nice work if you can get it, to cop a signature phrase from the late, great David M. Armstrong.  (For the record: I reject Armstrong's naturalism and atheism.)

I conjecture that it is the overwhelmingly strong doxastic security needs of dogmatists that prevent them from appreciating what I am saying. They cannot tolerate uncertainty, and so they manufacture a certainty that isn't there.

That being said, Dr. Novak may like my Pascalian conjecture that it is due to the Fall of Man that we are in this suboptimal epistemic predicament, the predicament of craving certainty without being able to attain it.

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Victor Davis Hanson on Joan Baez and Abolitio Memoriae

In Our War Against Memory, Hanson writes (hyperlinks added),

How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (“Back with my wife in Tennessee / When one day she called to me / Said, “Virgil, quick, come see / There goes the Robert E. Lee!”) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too.

[. . .]

The logical trajectory of tearing down the statue of a Confederate soldier will soon lead to the renaming of Yale, the erasing of Washington and Jefferson from our currency, and the de-Trotskyization of every mention of Planned Parenthood’s iconic Margaret Singer, the eugenicist whose racist views on abortion anticipated those of current liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Ginsburg said, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)

[. . .]

The strangest paradox in the current epidemic of abolitio memoriae is that our moral censors believe in ethical absolutism and claim enough superior virtue to apply it clumsily across the ages — without a clue that they fall short of their own moral pretensions, and that one day their own icons are as likely be stoned as the icons of others are now apt to be torn down by black-mask-wearing avengers.

A final paradox about killing the dead: Two millennia after Roman autocrats’ destruction of statues, and armed with the creepy 20th-century model of Fascists and Communists destroying the past, we, of a supposedly enlightened democracy, cannot even rewrite history by democratic means — local, state, and federal commission recommendations, referenda, or majority votes of elected representatives. More often, as moral cowards, we either rely on the mob or some sort of executive order enforced only in the dead of night.

More on Dreher vs Buchanan on “All Men are Created Equal” and White Supremacy

Dr. Patrick Toner comments and I respond in blue:

Your piece on Dreher and Buchanan accepts Dreher's overall reading (or misreading, as I see it) of Buchanan's argument — you seem to accept that Buchanan actually means to somehow call into doubt the metaphysical doctrine of the equality of men.  This seems clearly wrong to me.  
 
But before coming to that point, I want to check with you about another thing, namely, Dreher's accusation that Buchanan is openly endorsing white supremacy in his essay.  Things you've said elsewhere about the failure to define terms such as "white supremacy" make me hesitant to actually ascribe to you the belief that Buchanan is a white supremacist, but if that's right–if you aren't accepting the white supremacy charge–at any rate nothing in Sunday's piece makes that explicit.  And when you end your piece by talking about Buchanan "apparently repudiating" the doctrine of equality, there is at least a hint that you're willing to accept the charge.
BV: Thank you for these fine comments, Patrick. As a philosopher you understand the importance of defining terms. And yet you haven't offered us a definition of 'white supremacist.' Absent a definition, we cannot reasonably discuss whether or not Pitchfork Pat is a white supremacist, and whether the white supremacy charge is clearly bunk as you claim it is.
 
We could mean different things by the phrase 'white supremacist' and cognates.  I hope you will agree with me, however, that the phrase is actually used by most people emotively as a sort of semantic bludgeon or verbal cudgel for purely polemical purposes in much the same way that 'racist,' 'Islamophobe,' 'fascist,' and other emotive epithets are used.  On this usage, no morally decent and well-informed person could be a white supremacist.  The implication is that a white supremacist is a bigot, i.e., an unreasonably intolerant person who hates others just because they are different. It is a term of very serious disapprobation.
 
I would guess that you understand 'white supremacist' in something very close to this sense — which is why you take umbrage at Dreher's claim that Buchanan is a white supremacist. Bear in mind that that is Dreher's claim. I don't make it. My point of agreement with Dreher is solely on the question of the meaning of "All men are created equal."  It is spectacularly clear that, in the piece in question, Buchanan shows a lack of understanding of the meaning of the sentence.  Buchanan reads it as an empirical claim subject to falsification by experience.  It is not, as I explain in my parent post. Here again is what he wrote:
 
“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?
I was really surprised when I read that. It occurred to me that it might just be a slip occasioned by old age, anger at recent developments, or too much Irish whisky.
 
Now consider the following candidate definition of 'white supremacist.'
 
D1. A white supremacist is one who holds that the culture and civilization produced by whites is, on balance, superior to the cultures and civilizations produced by all other racial groups.
 
One could be a white supremacist in this sense and hold all of the following: (a) Slavery is a grave moral evil; (b) All men are created equal in the sense I explained; (c) No citizen should be excluded from the franchise because of race; (d) No citizen should be excluded from holding public office because of race; (e) All citizens regardless of race are equal before the law.
 
Buchanan might well be a white supremacist in the (D1)-sense.  Here is a bit of evidence: "Was not the British Empire, one of the great civilizing forces in human history, a manifestation of British racial superiority?"  Buchanan is not saying that the Brits merely thought themselves to be racially superior but that they really were. 
 
I think the white supremacy charge is clearly bunk–or at any rate, I'll say this: nothing in that particular column of Buchanan's can reasonably support a charge of white supremacy.  And I don't say that on the basis that "white supremacy" hasn't been adequately defined, or any other such technicality.  I just mean it should be clear that Buchanan's point is not to endorse white supremacy, but simply to point out that if that charge applies to Lee and co, then it applies to Washington and Jefferson and co, and indeed then we need to throw out the whole western culture that gave us the metaphysical doctrine of equality.  
BV: Again, unless you tell us what you mean by 'white supremacy,' there is no way to evaluate what you are saying. The matter of definition is not a mere technicality; it is crucial. I sketched two senses of 'white supremacist,' the 'semantic bludgeon' sense and (D1).  Now I agree that Buchanan is not a white supremacist in the first sense, but it looks like he is in the second.  So I totally reject your claim that "nothing in that particular column of Buchanan's can reasonably support a charge of white supremacy." 
 
You are also failing to appreciate that, just like an alt-righty, he shows no understanding of "All men are created equal." He is clearly giving it an empirical sense. That's blindingly obvious. Now I am going just on this one column. Perhaps in other works he says something intelligent on this point.  This is why Dreher is right against Buchanan despite the former's over-the-top rhetoric.
 
And then on to the next point: having thrown out the grounding upon which that doctrine stands, upon what shall we build our egalitarian utopia?  We can't re-establish the equality doctrine on some universally-acceptable empirical ground!  Buchanan doesn't doubt the equality doctrine: he points out that the iconoclasts seeking to build their new world on it, have no basis upon which to rationally accept it.  It's not a new or brilliant claim–it's pretty standard and obvious, I'd have thought.
 
BV: I am not quite sure what you are driving at here, but a tripartite distinction may help:
 
a) The Declaration sentence is empirical but false.
b) The Declaration sentence is empirical and true.
c)  The Declaration sentence is metaphysical, and thus non-empirical.
 
The alt-righties accept (a). The loons on the Left accept (b).  You and I accept (c).  You and I agree that the equality doctrine cannot be built on empirical ground.  I would guess that you and I also agree that if the Declaration sentence is making an empirical claim, then that claim is false.
 
I wrote this up yesterday in a little blog post, and I'm encouraged a bit in my reading (not that, in truth, I doubted it before!) by finding this column (not by Buchanan) posted today on Buchanan's website.  
Generally, I try to follow the advice of Thoreau, "read not the Times, read the eternities," and so I ignore such issues.  But I do read your blog faithfully, and for some reason–maybe just a lingering respect for Buchanan, who has always struck me as a decent man–you prompted me to read a bit of political ephemera to try to sort it out.  :)  
I hope you're doing well!  
 
BV: Thank you, sir.  I think we agree on the main issues, except that I really think it is important to define 'white supremacist' and not bandy it about unclarified.
 
I too love the Thoreau aphorism (and I'll bet you found it on my site; if not, forgive me my presumption) but I would add that in dangerous times one has to attend to the Times lest our enemies win and make it impossible for us to read the Eternities. Boethius was able to do philosophy in a prison cell, but most of us lesser mortal are not Boethian in this regard.
 
Keep your powder dry! (May the loons of the Left vex themselves over whether this is some sort of 'dog whistle.' It does have a Pitchfork Pat, "locked and loaded" ring to it.)

How Bad are Nazis?

Kurt Schlichter:

. . . Nazis are so bad that you have to devote all your hating capacity to hating Nazis such that there's no room left to hate anybody else. Those hammer and sickle flag-carrying Communists? Well, you must love the Nazis if you hate them, because you have got to hate the Nazis with all your mind and all your heart since, as we learned this week, Nazis are bad. I'm so glad that our moral betters have this all figured out.

I would have thought that one could and should morally condemn numerous groups all at once including the fascists of the Left who have the chutzpah to name themselves 'antifa,' the thugs of Black Lives Matter, that vicious anti-cop operation that takes its inspiration from brazen lies about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown of Ferguson 'fame,' the leftist termites who have infiltrated the universities and preside over the shouting-down of the speakers of truth, Muslim terrorists and their leftist enablers, and so on — but not excluding Nazis and neo-Nazis.

It has been fascinating to watch, over the last ten days or so, so-called conservatives falling all over themselves in a crazy attempt to achieve the apotheosis of high dudgeon in the condemnation of one relatively minor bunch of scumbags. Why? So that leftists will finally like you? Forget about it. It won't happen. To them you will always be a racist no matter what you say or do.  

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