Bill Vallicella – Page 344 – Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Grave Matters

Mattie Earp was the first common-law wife of Wyatt Earp. She is buried in the Pinal Pioneer Cemetery a little east of where I live. I located her gravesite a few days ago and took the picture to the left. 'A. T.' abbreviates 'Arizona Territory.' More photos and commentary later, perhaps.

For now, a few tunes.

Carter Family, Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree

Rosalie (Rosie) Hamlin of Rosie and the Originals died at age 71 on March 30th. A one-hit wonder, she will be remembered for her Angel Baby from 1961. John Lennon loved this song and recorded a version of it. But of course nothing touches the original.

Gregg Allman, too, shuffled off the mortal coil a few days ago, at age 69. Midnight Rider.

It's all a passing scene muchachos, a vanishing quantity, a riddle wrapped in a mist. Faith, hope, and love will help you through it.

What’s Wrong with Cultural Appropriation?

TRIGGER WARNING! The following may induce snowflake melt-down. The p.c.-whipped are strongly advised to don their pussy hats and proceed to their safe spaces.

…………

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inappropriate Automotive Niceness

Most of us prefer nice people to surly pricks. And no doubt we should all try to be nicer to our world-mates. But there is such a thing as inappropriate niceness. Here are two automotive examples for your consideration.

I am following at a safe distance the motorist in front of me. Then said motorist brakes for a jaywalker, not to avoid hitting him, but to allow him to cross. The jaywalker is violating the law; why aid and abet his lawbreaking? Why be nice to someone who shows no respect for the rules of the road? Why risk causing an accident? These are among the questions the inappropriately nice should ask themselves.

I am waiting to make a left turn. A man in an oncoming vehicle, wanting to be nice and neighborly, gestures for me to make the turn despite his having the right-of-way. I make the turn but shake my head in disgust at the man's presumably unwitting and admittedly minor undermining of the rule of law.

The man was probably a liberal. Liberals are good at feeling, but not so good at thinking.

A good conservative maxim: Truth and right count for more than human feelings.

Homo Homini Lupus

A 28-year-old Gypsy girl from the Tene Bimbo crime family 'befriends' an 85 year-old single man, marries him, and then poisons him, causing his death, in an attempt to steal his assets. The two were made for each other, the evil cunning of the woman finding its outlet in the utter foolishness of the man. What lessons are to be learned from this?

The first is one that serves as a criterion to distinguish conservative from liberal. The latter lives and dies in the pious belief that people are inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself. The conservative knows better: human nature is deeply flawed, structurally flawed, flawed beyond the hope of merely human amelioration. The conservative takes seriously the idea of original sin, if not the particulars of any particular doctrinal formulation. Even the atheist Schopenhauer was well-disposed toward the doctrine.

Though capable of near- angelic goodness, man is capable of near-diabolical evil. History records it, and only the foolish ignore it. The fact of radical evil cannot be gainsaid, as even the Enlightenment philosopher Kant (1781-1804) deeply appreciated. The timber of humanity is crooked, and of crooked timber no perfectly straight thing has ever been made. (Be it noted en passant that conservatives need to be careful when they generalize about the Enlightenment and wax critical of it. They might want to check their generalizations against the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, the Sage of Koenigsberg.)

My second point will elicit howls of rage from liberals, but their howling is music to my ears. The victim must bear some moral responsibility for the crime, albeit a much lower degree of responsibility than the perpetrator. For he allowed himself to be victimized by failing to make use of his faculties. (I assume the 85 year-old was not senile.) He did not think: "What could an attractive young woman see in a decrepit old specimen like me? What is she after?" He let his vanity and ego swamp and suborn his good judgment. He had a long life to learn the lesson that romantic love is more illusion than reality, but he failed to apply his knowledge. Blaming the victim is, up to a point, justified.

So man is a wolf to man and man is a lamb to man. Wolf and lamb 'need' each other. Be neither. You have a moral obligation to be neither.

Story here.

Friday Cat Blogging! Catfish Blues

Cultural appropriation and an egregious insult to cats!

Canned Heat, Catfish Blues, circa 1967. I forgot how good and distinctive Henry Vestine's guitar work is on this cut. From their first album, Canned Heat. I bought it when it first came out. Mint condition still. Not for sale! Heard 'em live at a club called the Kaelidoscope in Los Angeles and at the The Monterey Pop Festival 50 years ago this June.

Robert Petway, Catfish Blues, 1941.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

A case study.

Isn’t the Rope Too Long?

"Isn't the rope too long?" I wrote to the man who sent me the graphic a sinistra.

He replied, " The idea is the tree will grow and eventually be tall enough to hang him."

"I got that," said I. "But trees grow slowly and there's a lot of rope that has to hoisted before the man is hanged. Although Islam's threat to the culture of Europe is not imminent, it is not far in the future either.

So I say the rope is too long!"

In battling our ideological and existential enemies, all methods must be employed, including cartoons, jokes, mockery, derision, and tweets. You have to make them look ridiculous and 'uncool.' The young and immature are inordinately impressed by what is 'cool' and what is not. So we need comics like Dennis Miller and polemicists like Kurt Schlichter whose name for Hillary is 'Felonia von Pant-Suit.' That is perhaps more effective than the more accurate but brutal 'Crooked Hillary.'

Learned disquisitions and carefully crafted arguments are necessary but insufficient. You have to get the attention of the masses besotted and benumbed by the ever-present wash of media dreck.

Memo to George F. Will, et al.: it's about saving the West from its main internal threat, leftism, and its main external threat, radical Islam. It's not about gentlemanly conversations about Edmund Burke over good brandy and fine cigars in well-appointed drawing rooms while Rome burns.

More Proof that ‘Liberals’ are Morally Retarded

1) JPod on Kathy Griffin. It is not just Griffin who is at fault here, but every 'liberal' who contributes to an environment in which the sorry Griffin can get away with her vile stunt, at least initially. The nadir of cultural decline is still a ways off yet, however: CNN fired the sick comedienne.

2) Did you know that a pre-natal human being is a tough little object hard to dismember? Here:

In the new video, which is a compilation of excerpts from video filmed at the trade shows, abortionist Dr. Susan Robinson of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte is heard saying, “The fetus is a tough little object and, taking it apart, I mean taking it apart on day one is very difficult.”

Dr. Lisa Harris, medical director of Planned Parenthood Michigan, is also heard saying, “Let’s just give them all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing, let’s just give them all that.”

Director of abortion services for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast Dr. Ann Schutt-Aine states in the video, “If I’m doing a procedure, and I’m seeing that I’m in fear that it’s about to come to the umbilicus [navel], I might ask for a second set of forceps to hold the body at the cervix and pull off a leg or two, so it’s not PBA [partial-birth abortion].”

One irony here is that feminists protest, legitimately, against 'objectification.' But if the girl is young enough, then she is a "tough little object" the objectification of which can legally take the form of literal dismemberment.

If you voted for Hillary, you are complicit in this and also in the further moral outrage of using tax dollars to fund it.

What if you voted for neither Hillary not Trump? I'll leave that for you to think about.

Immigration Policy Comes First

I have been discussing Islamist terrorism with a couple of Brits who are open to the sorts of things I say. One of them I know is a conservative; the other I think is. What struck me is that both make a curious lefty move. The move is well-described by Heather Mac Donald:

Defenders of the open-borders status quo inevitably claim that if a terrorist is a second-generation immigrant, like Abedi [the Manchester suicide bomber], immigration policy has nothing to do with his attack. (Abedi’s parents emigrated to Britain from Libya; his immediate family in Manchester lived in the world’s largest Libyan enclave outside Africa itself.) Media Matters ridiculed a comment about the Manchester bombing by Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt with the following headline: FOX NEWS HOST SUGGESTS ‘OPEN BORDERS’ ARE TO BLAME FOR MANCHESTER ATTACK CARRIED OUT BY BRITISH NATIVE.

My correspondents are not open-borders advocates, but they seem to want to decouple questions about immigration policy from questions about 'homegrown' terrorists. That strikes me as foolish. I answer them in the words of Heather Mac:

Pace Media Matters, a second-generation Muslim immigrant with a zeal for suicide bombing is as much of an immigration issue as a first-generation immigrant with a terrorist bent. The fact that second-generation immigrants are not assimilating into Western culture makes immigration policy more, not less, of a pressing matter. It is absurd to suggest that Abedi picked up his terrorist leanings from reading William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, rather than from the ideology of radical Islam that has been imported into Britain by mass immigration.

Of course! Isn't that blindingly obvious?

And another thing.

'Homegrown terrorist' is an obfuscatory leftist phrase. That is why I enclosed it in sneer quotes above. Why obfuscatory? Because it elides an important distinction between those terrorists who are truly homegrown such as Timothy McVeigh and those who, while born in the USA, such as Omar Mateen, derive their 'inspiration' from foreign sources. Mateen's terrorism comes from his understanding of what Islam requires, namely, the liquidation of homosexuals. There is nothing homegrown about Islam. This in stark contrast to the American sources of McVeigh's terrorism.

It is perfectly obvious why liberals and leftists use 'homegrown terrorist' in application to the likes of Mateen: they want to deflect attention from the real problem, which is radical Islam.

Language matters!

Heather Mac's article is here.

Warning to ‘Liberals’

There is a line such that if you cross it you will have hell to pay. A lot of people think like Kurt Schlichter:

I know it’s theoretically wrong for a Republican candidate to smack around an annoying liberal journalist, but that still doesn’t mean that I care. Our ability to care is a finite resource, and, in the vast scheme of things, millions of us have chosen to devote exactly none of it toward caring enough to engage in fussy self-flagellation because of what happened to Slappy La Brokenshades.

Sorry, not sorry.

And that’s not a good thing, not by any measure, but it is a real thing. Liberals have chosen to coarsen our culture. Their validation and encouragement of raw hate, their flouting of laws (Hi leakers! Hi Hillary!) and their utter refusal to accept democratic outcomes they disapprove of have consequences. What is itself so surprising is how liberals and their media rentboyz are so surprised to find that we normals are beginning to feel about them the way they feel about us – and that we’re starting to act on it. If you hate us, guess what?

We’re going to start hating you right back.

Marital Fidelity and Masturbation

He who marries himself and intends to remain faithful to his partner has only one form of sexual expression open to him, namely, masturbation.

Another Liberal Witch Hunt

Jonathan Haidt is always worth reading: the blasphemy case against Brett Weinstein.

Why are the Never-Trumpers Still Anti-Trump?

Dennis Prager answers the question to my satisfaction. Here is the main part of his answer:

The first and, by far, the greatest reason is this: They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.

While they strongly differ with the left, they do not regard the left-right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation. On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do.

That is why, after vigorously opposing Trump's candidacy during the Republican primaries, I vigorously supported him once he won the nomination. I believed then, as I do now, that America was doomed if a Democrat had been elected president. With the Supreme Court and hundreds of additional federal judgeships in the balance; with the Democrats' relentless push toward European-style socialism — completely undoing the unique American value of limited government; the misuse of the government to suppress conservative speech; the continuing degradation of our universities and high schools; the weakening of the American military; and so much more, America, as envisioned by the Founders, would have been lost, perhaps irreversibly. The "fundamental transformation" that candidate Barack Obama promised in 2008 would have been completed by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

To my amazement, no anti-Trump conservative writer sees it that way. They all thought during the election, and still think, that while it would not have been a good thing if Hillary Clinton had won, it wouldn't have been a catastrophe either.

That's it, in a nutshell. Many conservatives, including me, believe that it would have been close to over for America as America if the Republican candidate, who happened to be a flawed man named Donald Trump, had not won. Moreover, I am certain that only Donald Trump would have defeated Hillary Clinton.

In other words, I believe that Donald Trump may have saved the country. And that, in my book, covers a lot of sins — foolish tweets, included.

Read it all.

I too vigorously opposed Trump's nomination. But when he got the nod, I had the good sense to support him. It boggled my mind that supposed conservatives at least as intelligent as me would support Hillary either by voting for her or by refusing to vote for Trump. What were they thinking? Prager's analysis is the best I have seen so far.

And 'surely' Prager is right that no one else could have defeated Hillary. A Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio would have been a re-play of Romney against Obama: too many conservatives would have stayed home.

Counterfactual conditionals are fascinating. I wish I understood them. But there is much that your humble correspondent does not understand.

'Had Cruz been the Republication nominee in 2016, then Hillary would have won the presidential election.'

How do I know that that is true? Logically prior question: what makes it true if it is true? And logicaly prior to that: do all or some truths need truthmakers?

And yet I am confident that the counterfactual in question is not only true, but more reasonably believed than its negation.

George Orwell on Julian Green

A footnote in Paul Tournier's The Meaning of Persons sent me to Julian Green, Personal Record 1928-1939. Here is George Orwell's review in Time and Tide, 13 April 1940:

Julian Green's diaries, which ten years ago or even five years ago might have seemed comparatively commonplace, are at this moment of the greatest interest. What they really record is the twilight of the aesthetic age, the last gasp of the cultivated second-generation rentier. With his extreme sensitiveness and his almost effeminate manner of writing, Mr Green is a figure particularly representative of the nineteen-twenties, of the period when simply to preserve your aesthetic integrity seemed a sufficient return for living on inherited money. Although the diary records visits to London, to various parts of Europe, and to America (Mr Green is of American origin though he writes in French), one has the feeling of being all the while in Paris, the Paris of old yellow-faced houses and green plane trees, and also of first nights, private views and interminable literary conversations with Gide, Gertrude Stein and Madame de Noailles. Everything is recorded with the restless sensitiveness of the writer, who translates his experience into literature almost as automatically as a cow turns grass into milk:

December 19th. A gas-lamp burning behind the glass door of a concierge's room at the end of a winter's day, with darkness overhead — what a lovely opening for a novel! Today, for a whole hour, I had nothing but this admirable picture in my mind.

February 2nd. At Versailles. . . . As I looked at the ivy-leaves with their dainty pale yellow borders, I had a moment of sadness at the thought that, till my life's end, things as lovely as they will be there for me to see and I shall have no time to describe them.

He writes much of his work, and his difficulties with his work (like the majority of writers he never feels in the mood for writing, and yet his books somehow get finished), of his dreams, which seem to affect his waking life considerably, and of his remembered childhood in the golden age "before the war". Nearly all his thoughts have a nostalgic tinge. But what gives them their special interest is that he is far too intelligent to imagine that his way of life or his scheme of values will last for ever. Totally uninterested in politics, he is nevertheless able to see, even as early as the nineteen-twenties, that the age of liberalism is ending and that wars, revolutions and dictatorships are just round the corner. Everything is cracking and collapsing. The shadow of Hitler flits almost constantly across the pages:

We are going to see life changing under our very eyes. Everything that gives us pleasure will be taken from us. . . . I am growing accustomed to the idea of vanishing from sight, together with all that I love in this world; for it seems reasonable to suppose that we are approaching the end of a long era. How long shall we sleep?. . . Paris is living in a sort of latent panic. . . . In the Europe of 1934 murder inevitably and fatally leads to other murder. How far can this go without the outbreak of war?. . . The war rumours continue as before. Everyone's daily life seems to be saturated with these feelings of apprehension. . . . The Rhineland has been reoccupied. . . . I was asked to say something on the wireless about Minuit. As if that were of the slightest importance with things as they are at the moment! But one has to go on pretending. . .

The feeling of futility and impermanence, of hanging about in a draughty room and waiting for the guns to begin to shoot, which has haunted many of us during the past seven years, is present everywhere, and it grows stronger as the diary moves towards 1939. Perhaps even the possession of this feeling depends upon being of a certain age (Julian Green is not quite forty), young enough to expect something from life and old enough to remember "before the war". It is a fact that the people who are now twenty do not appear to notice that the world is falling into ruins. But what is attractive in this diary is its complete impenitence, its refusal to move with the times. It is the diary of a civilized man who realizes that barbarism is bound to triumph, but who is unable to stop being civilized. A new world is coming to birth, a world in which there will be no room for him. He has too much vision to fight against it; on the other hand, he makes no pretence of liking it. As it is exactly that pretence that has been the stock-in-trade of the younger intelligentsia during the last few years, the ghostly sincerity of this book is deeply appealing. It has the charm of the ineffectual, which is so out-of-date as to wear an air of novelty.

Journeys and Preparations

We plan our journeys long and short. We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance. And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care. Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?

"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence. One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"

Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know? Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?