The Case for Nicotine

Nicotine is the main psychoactive ingredient in tobacco, and a most delightful and useful ingredient it is, especially for us Luftmenschen. I am thinking of the chess players who make Luft, not war, and of the philosophers whose thoughts are characteristically lofty and luftig even if at times nebelig. Nicotine is good for cognitive functioning, increasing both memory and attention. Studies on humans and lab animals show this to be the case. But we connoisseurs of the noble weed know this to be so without the help of studies. Experientia docet.

The drawback, of course, is that nicotine may be the most highly addictive substance on earth–more addictive than crack cocaine or heroin, and a more difficult addiction to shake, Rezvani said.

Why is that? First, it binds with the receptors in the brain for acetylcholine, one of our most important neurotransmitters and the first ever discovered. Second, because nicotine is usually inhaled, via cigarettes and now e-cigarettes, it hits the brain almost immediately.

“One reason for it being so addictive is that as soon as you smoke, you see the reward,” Rezvani said. The same is true of crack cocaine, he said.

The quotation 'smacks' of wild liberal exaggeration. It reeks of the Big Lie. People have been parroting that Everett Koop line for years. Remember that bow-tied sawbones who occupied the most useless office in the land, that of Surgeon General, from 1981 to 1989? Surely it is nonsense to say that nicotine is more addictive than heroin or crack cocaine. In fact, I will go one better: It is not addictive in any serious sense at all. But of course it all depends on what exactly is meant by 'addiction,' a word I have yet to see any anti-tobacco ideologue explain. It is a word that is used and overused and abused in all sorts of promiscuous connections.

You say you're addicted to nicotine? Well, if I paid you a million dollars to go one month without smoking, would you be able to do it? Of course you would. But if you had been shooting heroin daily for years and were addicted, and I made the same offer, would you be able to collect? No way! This is of course an empirical question, but some empirical questions can be answered from the armchair. This assumes that you have experience of life and some common sense, a commodity in short supply among liberals. It would be very interesting to set up an experiment, but you would need some moneybags to bankroll it. Anybody out there want to pony up 200 million USD? Do the experiment using 100 two-pack per day cigarette smokers and 100 heroin addicts who shoot up daily. You get a million bucks if you go a month without indulging. You will of course be under close surveillance. I predict the following outcome. 90 – 100% of the smokers but only 0-10% of the 'smackers' would collect.

And now for some anecdotal evidence, which is, after all, evidence: 'anecdotal' is not here functioning as an alienans adjective.

I have been smoking cigars and pipes for 45 years or so. Time was when I smoked two loads of pipe tobacco per diem, all the way down, and it was strong stuff. In Turkey where I lived for a year in the '90s I bought a Meerschaum pipe and I smoked an unconscionable quantity of the meanest shit there is, straight Turkish. Stateside the stuff is used sparingly as a seasoning in blends. I don't recommend it straight. Might blow your head clean off. Mine is still intact, thank you very much.

Now here's my point: if nicotine is addictive, then surely I ought to be addicted. But I'm not. I smoke only when I decide to, nowadays, less than one cigar per week. But I smoke the sucker down to the bitter end, reducing the whole of it to smoke and ashes. "But doesn't it burn your fingertips?" Not if I tamp it down into a smoking pipe. The finale is mighty rasty and loaded with nicotine. And I am still not addicted.

I am not an isolated exception. There are all the two-pack-a day cigarette smokers who just up and quit of their free will without a federal program or a 'patch' or somebody holding their hand. I'm thinking of my father, and aunts and uncles, and brother-in-law, and hundreds of others. And they smoked unfiltered Camels and Lucky Strikes, not the pussy brands abroad in the land today.

Now suppose I was smoking crack cocaine or mainlining heroin for the last 45 years. I'd mostly like be dead, but if I weren't I would be addicted in a serious sense of that word. So there is just no comparison. It's a bullshit comparison that only a willfully nescient liberal could love.

Can you call a substance 'addictive' if only some people become 'addicted' to it? I say No. In the case of nicotine, it is not the substance that is addictive but the user who allows himself of his own free will to become 'addicted.' (Those are 'sneer' quotes by the way.) You say you have an 'addictive personality'? I'm going to question that too. You are most likely just looking for an excuse. Why not say you lack self-discipline and that you refuse to take yourself in hand; that instead of doing those things, you blame your problems on something outside of yourself, whether tobacco or tobacco companies, or 'society'?

The case for nicotine, then, is that it is a sovereign enhancer of cognitive functioning. And you can get it without smoking cigarettes or using snuff. I recommend that you stay away from cigarettes and snuff.

There is a lot to say on this topic and lot of liberal nonsense to dispose of. But I'll end today with this aphorism:

The church of liberalism must have its demon and his name is 'tobacco.'

Peter Unger Introduces a Central Thesis of his New Book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy

Here, via Dave Lull. The comments, as one ought to expect, are not very good. Here as elsewhere, and to exaggerate a bit, the best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.

I have read large chunks of Unger's new book and I hope to provide a critical response to some of it before too long. For now I refer the interested reader to a couple of recent Unger-related entries.

Peter Unger on Betrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy

Can one Copulate one's Way to Chastity? Notes on Wittgenstein and Unger

Pew Research Center Political Typology Quiz

I started to take the quiz but then quit in disgust after the first two questions.

Here is the first question:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?

Government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest.

Government regulation of business usually does more harm than good.

I would say that both statements are true. That some government regulation is necessary is obviously true. But that many types of regulation makes things worse is also the case, though it is not as obvious. What does it even mean to ask which of these comes closest to my view? The rational thing to do is reject the question as poorly defined.

Here is the second question:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?

Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard

Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most.

Again, both of these statements are true, at least in the USA at the present time. The second statement is obviously true. Success is not guaranteed for anyone. You could be doing everything right and be killed by a drunk driver. In every success there is some element of luck. The first statement is not as clearly true, but it too is true. Again, there is the problem of what 'comes closest' even means. I am a conservative and so you will expect me to plump for the first statement. But the second is one that every sane person must accept. So in one sense of 'closest' the second is closest to my view. In another sense, the first is closest, because it is more characteristic of my view. A near-certainty that everyone must accept on pain of being irrational is not characteristic of any political view. Capiche?

Not all of the question pairs display the faults of the first two. They display others such as false alternative. And a few, I grant, are well-formulated. #20 for example:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?

Our country has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites

Our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.

These statements cannot both be true, and there is no false alternative: it must be that one of them is true.

Do You Really Want to Help Black Americans?

Then stop trying to 'help' them. Excellent advice for liberals from a black man, Jason Riley. The Left will of course denounce him as an Uncle Tom, an 'oreo,' a traitor to his race, among other things. But that is all the more reason to read him with close attention. Leftists cannot abide anyone who talks sense. Here is Riley on the Zimmerman case.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Performers Who Ditched Their Italian Surnames

But first one who didn't. An early manager suggested to Frank Sinatra that he adopt the stage name 'Frankie Satin.' Sinatra would have none of that bullshit. He did things his way. You got a problem with that? That's Life.

Joseph Di Nicola (Joey Dee and the Starlighters), Peppermint Twist, with an intro by Dwight D. Eisenhower! This video shows what the dude looked like. Resembles a super short Joe Pesci. What Kind of Love is This?

Margaret Battavio (Little Peggy March), I Will Follow Him. This one goes out to the sycophants of the Ladderman.

Frank Castelluccio (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons), Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. Dawn. Walk Like a Man. Wifey and I saw Jersey Boys, the movie, and enjoyed it immensely. Here's the trailer. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Gets a lot of the period details right, like women's slacks with the zipper up the back. See how many period references you can identify. Topo Gigio. The Blob. Etc.

Anthony Dominic Benedetto (Tony Bennett), The Way You Look Tonight

Alfred Arnold Cocozza (Mario Lanza), O Sole Mio. Here is what Elvis made of the tune.

Francis Thomas Avallone (Frankie Avalon), Venus.

Fabiona Forte Bonaparte (Fabian), his songs are too schlocky even for my catholic tastes.

Political Polarization in America

A good article from the Pew Research Center, with links to other fascinating articles.

These may be times that try our souls, but they are also times in which it is impossible to be bored. So look at the bright side.

Undocumented Workers and Illegal Aliens

One of the purposes of this site is to combat the stupidity of Political Correctness, a stupidity that in many contemporary liberals, i.e., leftists, is willful and therefore morally censurable. The euphemism 'undocumented worker' is a good example of a PC expression. It does not require great logical acumen to see that 'undocumented worker' and 'illegal alien' are not coextensive expressions. The extension of a term is the class of things to which it applies. In the diagram below, let A be the class of illegal aliens, B the class of undocumented workers, and A^B the intersection of these two classes. All three regions in the diagram are non-empty, which shows that A and B are not coextensive, and so are not the same class. Since A and B are not the same class, 'undocumented worker' and 'illegal alien' do not have the same intension or meaning. Differing in both extension and intension, these expressions are not intersubstitutable.

To see why, note first that there are illegal aliens who are not workers since they are either petty criminals, or members of organized criminal gangs e.g., MS-13, some of whose members are illegal aliens, or terrorists, or too young to work, or unable to work. Note second that there are illegal aliens who have documents all right — forged documents. Note third that there are undocumented workers who are not aliens: there are American citizens who work but without the legally requisite licenses and permits.

So the correct term is 'illegal alien.' It is descriptive and accurate and there is no reason why it should not be used.

Now will this little logical exercise convince a leftist to use language responsibly and stop obfuscating the issue? Of course not. Leftism in some of its forms is willfully embraced reality denial, and in other of its forms is a cognitive aberration, something like a mental illness, in need of therapy rather than refutation. In a longer post I would finesse the point by discussing the cognitive therapy of Stoic and neo-Stoic schools, which does include some logical refutation of unhealthy views and attitudes, but my rough-and-ready point stands: one cannot refute the sick. They need treatment and quarantine and those who go near them should employ appropriate prophylactics.

So why did I bother writing the above? Because there are people who have not yet succumbed to the PC malady and might benefit from a bit of logical prophylaxis. One can hope.

Hope for the best. But prepare for the worst.

The Academic Philosophers of Consciousness

Too many of the academic philosophers of consciousness are overly concerned with the paltriest aspects of consciousness, so-called qualia, and work their tails off trying to convince themselves and others that they are no threat to physicalism.

While man's nobility lies in the power of thought whereby he traverses all of time and existence, our materialists labor mightily to make physicalism safe for the smell of cooked onions.

On the Unseemly

Although the world runs on appearances, a fact well to be heeded by anyone who plans to hang out long in these sublunary precincts, the task of the philosopher is to penetrate seemings, whence we may conclude that it is unseemly for a philosopher to be much concerned with the seemly and the unseemly.

A Question of Time Apportionment

How much time ought to be devoted to learned inquiry into the question of immortality and how much to living in such a way as to deserve it?

The Left’s Insensitivity to Danger

What follows is an old post from about ten years ago worth dusting off in the light of current events. If 'true' admits of degrees, what I say below is truer now than it was then. Just two of several current examples. Barack Obama, the most Left-leaning president in U. S. history, traded Bowe Bergdahl for five of the worst Gitmo terrorists. Was that a prudent thing to do? Only someone who is blind to a clear and present danger could do something so utterly irresponsible. The second example is the Iraq pullout, the effect of which, whether intended or not, is to make the whole region safe for ISIS. Anyone with his head screwed on right would have seen that coming. But not a leftist insensitive to danger. I could go on, the Southern border . . . .

…………..

Conservatives take a sober view of human nature. They admit and celebrate the human capacity for good, but cannot bring themselves to ignore the practically limitless human capacity for evil. They cannot dismiss the lessons of history, especially the awful lessons of the 20th century, the lessons of Gulag and Vernichtungslager. They know that evil is not a contingent blemish that can be isolated and removed, but has ineradicable roots reaching deep into human nature. The fantasies of Rousseau and Marx get no grip on them. Conservatives know that it is not the state, or society, or institutions that corrupt human beings, but that it is the logically antecedent corruption of human nature that makes necessary state, social, and institutional controls. The timber of humanity is inherently and irremediably crooked; it was not first warped by state, social, or institutional forces, and cannot be straightened by any modification or elimination of these forces.

I used the word 'know' a couple of times, which may sound tendentious. How do conservatives know that evil is not a contingent blemish, or that human beings are so fundamentally flawed that no human effort can usher in utopia?

They know this from experience. But although experience teaches us what is the case, and what has been the case, does it teach what must be the case? Here the lefties may have wiggle room. They can argue that failure to achieve a perfect society does not conclusively show that a perfect society cannot be achieved. This is true. But repeated failures add up to a strong inductive case. And these failures have been costly indeed. The Communists murdered an estimated 100 million in their social experiments. They did not hesitate to break eggs on a massive scale in quest of an omelet that never materialized. They threw out 'bourgeois' morality, but this did not lead to some higher morality but to utter barbarity.

I would also argue that experience can sometimes teach us what must be the case. We have a posteriori knowledge of the essential (as opposed to accidental) properties of some things. These are tough epistemological questions that I mention here only to set aside.

The main point I want to make is that the Left is insensitive to danger because of its Pollyannish view of human beings as intrinsically good. Leftists tend to downplay serious threats. They are blind to the radical evil in human nature. This attitude is betrayed by their obfuscatory use of the phrase 'Red Scare' to the very real menace the USSR posed to the USA in the 1950's and beyond. It wasn't that conservatives were scared, but that the Soviets were making threats. This is now particularly clear from the Venona decrypts, the Mitrokhin archives, and other sources. I especially recommend reading Ronald Radosh on the Rosenberg case.

The Left's insensitivity to danger is also betrayed by their attitude toward the present Islamo-terrorist threat. They just can't seem to take it seriously, as witness their incessant complaining about the dangers to civil liberties after the 9/11/01 attacks. There is something deeply perverse about their attitude. They must realize that a liberty worth wanting requires security as a precondition. See my Liberty and Security for an exfoliation of this idea. But if they grasp this, why the unreasonable and excessive harping on individual liberties in a time of national peril? Don't they understand that the liberties we all cherish are worthless to one who is being crushed beneath a pile of burning rubble? How could Katrina van den Heuvel on C-Span the other day refer to Bush's playing of the 'terror card'? Such talk is border-line delusional.

It is as if they think that conservatives want to curtail civil liberties, and have seized upon the 9/11 attacks to have an excuse to do so. In the lunatic world of the leftist a conservative is a 'fascist' — to use their favorite term of abuse. This is absurd: it is precisely conservatives who aim to conserve civil liberties, including the politically incorrect ones such as gun rights.

Terrorists and the rogue states that sponsor them pose a very real threat to our security, and this threat must be faced and countered even if it requires a temporary abridgement of certain liberties. That is what happens in war time. Leftists ought to admit that it is precisely their insensitivity to the threat posed by such Islamo-terrorists as Osama bin Laden that led to the 9/11 attacks in the first place. If a proper response had been made to the 1993 World Trade Tower attack, the 2001 attack might never have occurred. We were attacked because we were perceived as weak and decadent, and we were perceived as weak and decadent because leftists in the government failed to take seriously the terrorist threat.

It must be realized that liberty without security is worthless. Genuine liberty is liberty within a stable social and political order. I may have the liberty to leave my house any time of the day or night, but such a liberty is meaningless if I get mugged the minute I step out my door. So if the Left were really serious about liberty, it would demand adequate security measures.

Ten Years After: Remembering Sidney Morgenbesser

I don't envy anybody anything, but if I were to envy somebody something, I would envy my friend Peter Lupu his friendship with Sidney Morgenbesser.

‘Yeah, Yeah’: Eulogy for Sidney Morgenbesser, Philosopher With a Yiddish Accent

Wieseltier on Sidney

NYT obituary

Is Islam a Religion?

An article by Howard Kainz

David Stove’s Tribute to David Armstrong

Excerpt:

But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.

This attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.

After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.

David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.

By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.

The result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.

There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.

But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.

Gasthaus Blut und Boden

Imagine a German restaurant so named. Blood and Soil. My astute readers needn't be reminded of the provenience of this phrase. "Best blood sausage in the East Valley!" Or MOM's Diner of Mesa. "Fine Aryan cuisine served up right by members of the militia of Montana." Would you be offended? I just made up those examples.

But this is a real example: La Raza Steak and Ribs, a Mexican joint in Apache Junction, Arizona. When I mentioned this to a friend, he replied, "That would be like naming a German restaurant Die Rasse, The Race."

Once again, the double standard. And once again I ask: what would be left of the Left were they disembarrassed of every single one of their double standards?

Thanks to the Left: Balkanization, Tribalism, Civil War

Voluntary Balkanization: Good or Bad?