Should we be surprised?
President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.
"Regardless of individuals' behavior." Think about that.
There is no need to play the 'numbers game.' The photo ID requirement is a matter of principle.
Anyone with common sense ought to be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, a manner to inspire confidence in the citizenry, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc., are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the possibility of fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as one.
But if you want to play the 'numbers game' voter fraud does occur often enough to be a serious problem.
Death says, "I too am in Arcadia."
The contemplation of death, one's own in particular, cures one of the conceit that this life has a meaning absolute and self-contained. Only those who live naively in this world, hiding from themselves the fact of death, flirting with transhumanist arcadian and other utopian fantasies, can accord to this life the ultimate in reality and importance.
If you deny a life beyond the grave, I won't consider you foolish or even unreasonable. But if you anticipate a paradise on earth, I will consider you both. And if you work to attain such a state in defiance of morality, then I will consider you evil, as evil as the Communists of the 20th century who murdered 100 million to realize their impossible fantasies.
Guercino – Et in Arcadia Ego – 1618-22 – Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini
Here we go again:
First, a voter restriction is like a poll tax when its authors use voting fraud as a pretext for legislation that has little to do with voting fraud.
Second, it is like a poll tax when it creates only a small nuisance to some voters, but for other groups it erects serious barriers to the ballot.
Third, it is like a poll tax when it has crude partisan advantage as its most immediate aim.
1. Presumably the issue concerns the requirement that voters produce government-issued photo ID at polling places. Voting fraud is obviously not a 'pretext' for such a requirement but a good reason to put such a requirement in place. The claim that photo ID legislation has little to do with voting fraud is ludicrous. The whole point of it is to prevent fraud.
2. It is just silly to claim that phtoto ID "erects a serious barrier to the ballot." If you don't have a driver's license, you can easily acquire photo ID from a DMV office for a nominal sum. You are going to need it anyway for all sorts of other purposes such as cashing checks. In the state of Arizona, the ID is free for those 65 and older and for those on Social Security disability. For others the fee is nominal: $12 for an ID valid for 12 years.
3. Those who support photo ID are aiming at "crude partisan advantage?" How is that supposed to work? Do non-Democrats get such an advantage when they stop voter fraud? Is the idea that it it par for the course that Dems should cheat, and so, when they are prevented from cheating, their opponents secure a"crude partisan advantage?"
What we have is crude psychological projection. Unable to own up to their own unsavory win-at-all-costs motivations, liberals impute to conservatives unsavory motives. "You want to disenfranchise blaxcks and Hispanics!" As if these minorities are so bereft of life skills that they lack, or cannot acquire, a simple photo ID. Note also the trademark liberal misuse of language.
To disenfranchise is to deprive of a right, in particular, the right to vote. But only some people have the right to vote. Felons and children do not have the right to vote, nor do non-citizens. You do not have the right to vote in a certain geographical area simply because you are a sentient being residing in that area. Otrherwise, my cats would have the right to vote. Now a requirement that one prove that one has the right to vote is not to be confused with a denial of the right to vote.
My right to vote is one thing, my ability to prove I have the right another. If I cannot prove that I am who I claim to be on a given occasion, then I won't be able to exercise my right to vote on that occasion; but that is not to say that I have been 'disefranchised.' For I haven't be deprived of my right to vote; I have merely been prevented from exercising my right due to my inability do prove my identity.
I am still looking for a decent argument against photo ID.
The space of scholars is made safe by the blood of warriors.
Marvellous, travelling, tranquillity. Not that the single 'l' is wrong. It could be argued that the extra 'l' does no work and just takes up space. What's my rule? Being a conservative across the board, I am a linguistic conservative, though flexibly such and not hide-bound like some people I could mention. So I may well split an infinitive if the forward momentum of the sentence demands it. And the muscular elegance to which my prose style aspires often requires the use of contractions, as above, fourth sentence. The schoolmarms be damned. And great writers too, such as George Orwell, when they presume to dictate iron-clad rules of good writing. Here I show that Orwell falls into traps of his own setting.
The Latin tranquillitas sports two 'l's. So to honor that fact I write 'tranquillity.' You are free to drop the second 'l' — or the first.
My rule, I suppose, is to favor the old way as long as the archaicism does not mount to the point of distraction.
One of the fruits of civilization is that it allows some of us to occupy ourselves with bagatelles such as this.
But don't forget that civilization is thin ice and that we must be prepared to defend it with blood and iron. (A sentence slouching toward mixed metaphor?)
My wife observed last night that our young cats are very active at twilight. No surprise there, said I. Neither diurnal nor nocturnal in their hunting habits, housecats are a crepuscular species of critter. The word derives from the Latin crepuscula, twilight. But there is morning twilight and evening twilight. And so critters crepuscular are either matinal or vespertine or both. Matins are prayers said in the morning while vespers are prayers said in the evening. Cats, however, prey rather than pray. When not on the prowl or in play they sleep, having been made in the image and likeness of Sloth.
There is also an interesting etymological connection between Hesperus (Hesperos), the Evening Star, and vespers. Hesperos/Hesperus became the Latin Vesperus. Eosphoros/Phosphoros became the Latin Luciferus, Lucifer, light-bearer, from L. lux, lucis, light. Interesting that the Bearer of Light in his later career became the Prince of Darkness.
Eosphoros and Hesperos in their later careers went from being gods to being mere Fregean senses, mere modes of representation, Darstellungsweisen, and conduits of reference.
Here a cool cat name of Thelonious Sphere Monk bangs out "Crepuscule with Nellie." Was he on the prowl with her, or just hanging out in the gloaming?
I just heard Dennis Prager say on his nationally syndicated radio show that travelling together is a good test for marital compatibility. Sage advice.
Long before I had heard of Prager I subjected my bride-to-be to such a test. I got the idea from the delightful 1982 movie The Diner. One of the guys who hung out at the diner tested for marital suitability by administering a football quiz to his fiance. That gave me the idea of taking my future wife on a cross-country trip from Cleveland, Ohio to Los Angeles, California in my Volkswagen bus. This was not a camper bus, but a stripped-down model, so the amenities were meager-to-nonexistent. I threw a mattress in the back, made some curtains, and hit the road. That was in the summer of '82. The soundtrack from The Diner was one of the tapes we listened to on the way. I recall reading the Stephen King novel Cujo about the dog from hell when my inamorata drove.
We slept mainly at rest stops. I had an old .38 Special with me for protection, which fortunately proved unnecessary. What did we do for showers? I don't think we took any. We cleaned up at the rest stop facilities like true vagabundos and moved on.
One dark and starry night I pulled off Interstate 10 in some desolate stretch of the Mojave desert. Wifey-to-be was scared but it was a memorable moonless star-studded night. We made it to L. A., saw family and friends, then headed up old U. S. 395 along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada to Bishop, Cal, where we visited some more of my people, then north to Reno, Nevada where we hooked up with I-80 and pointed the old bus East.
Dear one took the rigors of that trip 30 years ago like a trouper, and passed the test with flying colors. We got married the following summer and remain happily married 29 summers later.
When I told the story to a feminazi some years back she gave me a hard and disapproving look. She didn't like that I imposed a marital compatibility test upon my lady love. Bitch! So here's another bit of free and friendly advice. Marry an angel, never a bitch. Life's enough of a bitch. You don't need to marry one. Does your belllicosity need an outlet? Fight outside the home. Home should be an oasis of peace and tranquillity.
So once again I agree with Prager. Check her or him out on the road before heading for the altar.
It being so cold in these parts this time of year, I had a big bowl of hot and sour soup for lunch at a local Chinese joint. The message inside the fortune cookie read:
Luck favors prepared mind.
In the literary vicinity of that conservative favorite:
The harder I work, the luckier I get.
'Horses exist' is an example of an affirmative general existential sentence. What is the status of the predicate '___ exist' in such a sentence? One might maintain that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate; one might maintain that it is a first-level distributive predicate; one might maintain that it is a first-level non-distributive (collective) predicate.
1. Frege famously maintained that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, a predicate of concepts only, and never a first-level predicate, a predicate of objects. Russell followed him in this. A consequence of this view is that 'Horses exist' is not about what it seems to be about, and does not say what it seems to say. It seems to be about horses, and seems to say of them that they exist. But on Frege's analysis the sentence is about the concept horse and says of it, not that it exists, but that it has one or more instances.
Paradoxically, the sentence ''Horses exist' on Frege's analysis says about a non-horse something that cannot be true of a horse or of any concrete thing!
For an interesting comparison, consider 'Horses surround my house.' Since no horse could surround my house, it is clear that the sentence is not about each of the horses that surround my house. What then is it about? One will be tempted to reach for some such singularist analysis as: 'A set of horses surrounds my house.' But this won't do since no such abstract object as a set could surround anything. So if the sentence is really about a set of horses then it cannot say what it appears to say. It must be taken to say something different from what it appears to say. So what does 'Horses surround my house' say about a set if it is about a set?
One might be tempted to offer this translation: 'A set of horses is such that its members are surrounding my house.' But this moves us in a circle, presupposing as it does that we already understand the irreducibly plural predication 'Horses surround my house.' After all, if the members of a set of horses surround my house that is no different from horses surrounding my house.
The circularity here is structurally similar to that of the Fregean analysis. If 'Horses exist' is about a concept, and says of that concept that it has instances, then of course those instances are horses that exist. So the attempt to remove existence from individuals and make of it a property of concepts ends up reinstating existence as a 'property' of individuals.
Pursuing the analogy a bit further, the refusal to grant that there are irreducibly plural predications such as 'Horses surround my house' is like the refusal to grant that there are irreducibly first-level existence sentences.
2. Pursuing the analogy still further, is it possible to construe the predicate in 'Horses exist' as a non-distributive first-level predicate like the predicate in 'Horses surround my house'? First some definitions.
A predicate F is distributive just in case it is analytic that whenever some things are F, then each is F. Thus a distributive predicate is one the very meaning of which dictates that if it applies to some things, then it applies to each of them. 'Blue' is an example. If some things are blue, then each of them is blue.
If a predicate is not distributive, then it is non-distributive (collective). If some Occupy-X nimrods have the building surrounded, it does not follow that each such nimrod has the building surrounded. If some students moved a grand piano into my living room, it does not follow that each student did. If bald eagles are becoming extinct, it does not follow that each bald eagle is becoming extinct. Individual animals die, but no individual animal ever becomes extinct. If the students come from many different countries, it does not follow that each comes from many different countries. If horses have an interesting evolutionary history, it does not follow that each horse has an interesting evolutionary history.
I will assume for the purposes of this post that 'Horses surround my house' and 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' are irreducibly plural predications. (That they are plural is obvious; that they are irreducibly plural is not. For arguments see Thomas McKay, Plural Predication.) And of course they are first-level as well: they are about horses, not about concepts or properties or propositional functions. Now is 'Horses exist' assimilable to 'Horses surround my house' or is it assimilable to 'Horses are four-legged'? The predicate in the later is a distributive first-level predicate, whereas the predicate in 'Horses surround my house' is a non-distributive first-level predicate.
I am assuming that the 'Fressellian' second-level analysis is out, but I won't repeat the arguments I have given ad nauseam elsewhere.
I do not understand how 'exist(s)' could be construed as a non-distributive predicate. For if it is non-distributive, then it is possible that some things exist without it being the case that each of them exists. And that I do not understand. If horses exist, then each horse exsts.
Peter van Inwagen seems (though it not clear to me) to be saying that 'exists(s)' is a non-distributive first-level predicate. He compares 'Horses exist' to 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.' 'Horses exist,' he tells us, is equivalent to 'The number of horses is not zero.' ("Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," p. 483) But he denies that 'exists(s)' is second-level. To say that the number of horses is not zero is to predicate of horses that they number more than zero. (483) It is not to predicate of the concept horse that the cardinality of its extension is more than zero.
Now we cannot say of a horse that it surrounds a house or has an interesting evolutionary history. We can say that of horses, but not of a horse. Can we say of a horse that it numbers more than zero? We can of course say of horses that they number more than zero. But I don't see how we can sensibly say of an individual horse that it numbers more than zero. Perhaps Frege was wrong to think that number words can only be predicates of concepts which are ones-over-many. Perhaps all one needs is the many, the plurality. But it seems one needs at least that to swerve as logical subject. If this is right, and to exist is to number more than zero, then we cannot sensibly say of an individual that it exists. We can say this of individuals but not of an individual. But surely we can say of an individual horse that it exists. So I conclude that 'exist(s)' cannot be a first-level non-distributive predicate.
3. And so one is driven to the conclusion that 'exist(s)' is a first-level distributive predicate. 'Horses exist' says of each individual horse that it exists. But isn't this equally objectionable? The vast majority of horses are such that I have no acquaintance with them at all. So how can my use of 'Horses exist' be about each horse?
It is at this juncture that Frege gets his revenge:
We must not think that I mean to assert something of an African chieftain from darkest Africa who is wholly unknown to me, when I say 'All men are mortal.' I am not saying anything about either this man or that man, but I am subordinating the concept man to the concept of what is mortal. In the sentence 'Plato is mortal' we have an instance of subsumption, in the sentence 'All men are mortal' one of subordination. What is being spoken about here is a concept, not an individual thing. (Posthumous Writings, p. 213)
Plato falls under the concept man; he does not fall within it. The concept mortal does not fall under the concept man — no concept is a man — but falls within it. When I say that all men are mortal I am not talking about individual men, but about the concept man, and I am saying that this concept has as part of its content the subconcept mortal.
Similarly, my utterance of 'Horses exist' cannot be about each horse; it is about the concept horse, and says that it has instances — which is the view I began by rejecting and for god reason.
We seem to have painted ourselves into an aporetic corner. No exit. Kein Ausgang. A-poria.
It turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals. But why?
Conservative explanation. Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness. More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.
Liberal explanation. Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world. They are oblivious to inequality. And when they do see it,they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss. Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.
As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.
Do we conservatives, ostrich-like, ignore injustice? The answer depends on what one takes justice to be. The liberal tendency is to see justice as fairness, and to understand fairness in terms of material equality, equality of wealth and equality of power. A just society for a liberal, then, is one in which material inequality is either eliminated or severely mitigated. Along these lines the prominent political philosopher John Rawls puts forth his famous Difference Principle the gist of which is that social and economic inequalities in a society are justified only if they benefit the worst off, i.e., only if the worst off are better of than they would have been without the inequality.
But why should my having more than you be considered unjust unless it benefits you? Of course, my having more than you will typically benefit you. "A rising tide lifts all boats." My roof was leaking in two places. Now I could have done an amateur patch job myself: roofing ain't rocket science. But I decided to have the entire house professionally re-roofed with all that that entails in terms of new flashing, etc. My ability to afford such an expensive job gave support to a local company and all its jobbers, not to mention the crew of workers who had employment for a week. And having extra dough, I laid $60 in tips on the workers. I could give a hundred examples of how my having more than certain others benefits those others. When's the last time a poor man made a loan to a friend, or a contribution to a charity? How many poor people give people jobs? And of course people like me who are modestly well-off have been benefited in innumerable ways by people who are wealthy. Think of those who have endowed art museums and university chairs.
But suppose, contrary to fact, that my having more did not benefit others. Why should that affect the justice of my having more? If I work harder, longer, and smarter than you, and practice the old-fashioned virtues that liberals mock even when they themselves owe their success to them, then it is a good bet that I will end up with more than you. Unless I engage in force or fraud I am entitled to what I earn or what I inherit or what falls out of the sky into my lap. Take my intelligence and my good genes. Do I deserve them? No, but I have a right to them. I have a right to them and right to what I acquire by their use.
I grant that a certain amount of luck is ingredient in every success. But I have a right to my good luck even though I don't deserve it. Of course, liberals often 'see' luck where there is no luck at all but hard work and the exercise of conservative virtues. Hence the conservative saying, "The harder I work the luckier I become." The point is that what the liberal misconstrues as luck is really not luck at all but effort. Should we help life's unlucky? I should think so. But not if the helping is really a harming, a making of the recipients of charity weaker and more dependent.
Liberals consider it legitimate for the state to use its coercive powers to promote material equality by taking from the highly productive and giving to the unproductive and less productive. This cannot work in the long run. The well-off will resist being ripped off by government functionaries who line their own pockets and feather their nests with perquisites purchased at taxpayer expense. Many will expatriate. Government, it is clear, is too often a hustle like any hustle rigged by those who benefit from it for their own benefit. Government needn't be a hustle, but too often it is, which is why vigilance on the part of the citizenry is necessary to keep it in check.
The value of liberty trumps that of material equality. This is a key difference between conservative and libertarian on the one side and leftist on the other. Naturally I believe in formal equality, equality of treatment, treating like cases in a like manner, not discriminating on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as race, sex, or creed.
Of course, it depends on the creed. If you are a radical Muslim out to impose sharia and subvert our way of life, and act upon your beliefs, then you ought to be deported, or jailed, or executed, depending on the nature of your actions. You should never have been let in in the first place. After all, toleration, though a good thing, has limits, and if he do not see that it has limits then you are hopelessly foolish. In a word, you are a liberal.
For more on toleration and its limits see my aptly titled Toleration category.
Here. Excerpt:
For all his claims of erudition, Vidal suffered the wages of the public autodidact. I noticed he quoted Latin ad nauseam — and nearly always with his nouns and adjectives not just in the wrong cases (especially the confusion of the accusative and ablative in preposition phrases), but predictably in the fashion of those who like to copy down Latin phrases but cannot read a complete Latin sentence. By his sixties, Vidal had degenerated into a conspiracy theorist, and his embarrassing late-life infatuation with Timothy McVeigh caught the eye of the goddess Nemesis.
To deracinate is to uproot. W. K. sends this:
That article about political correctness in the universities you linked to reminded me of David Conway's comments in A Defence of the Realm about the 'systematic deracination' of the citizens of western liberal democracies since World War Two:
Through changes in educational curricula, plus other cultural changes, most notably in public broadcasting, the cultural majorities in these societies have been made increasingly unfamiliar with their national histories and traditions. Without adequate historical knowledge of their national histories and without encouragement and opportunity to participate in national traditions, the members of a society cannot be expected to have much understanding of or affection for them.
Historically, nowhere in the world have women been better treated than in Christian nations. In his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote the first tribute in history to an ordinary woman, his mother, Monica. The Divine Comedy is highest praise of a woman ever. According to Christianity, the Virgin Mary is the greatest human being ever to have lived. Be proud of that.
The accusers during the witch hunts were overwhelmingly women.
One-hundred and fifty years ago, ninety-five percent of men didn't have the vote.
In nineteenth-century England, more novels were published by women than by men. And they wrote under their own names, contrary to the feminist myth that women were obliged to take male names.
Western literature starts with an account of men fighting over a woman. Listen to Achilles: ‘Why must we battle Trojans, men of Argos? Why, why in the world if not for Helen with her loose and lustrous hair?’And Odysseus endures all perils and resists all temptations – even immortality – to get back home to his wife. Medieval chivalric literature also testifies to the fact that women were highly esteemed.
Homosexuality
Plato made sodomy illegal in his Laws.
Poets and orators did not express longings to return to their catamites.
Adult Athenians who acted as catamites were excluded from all offices in public life, not even being permitted to address the assembly.
Dead White Males
Most great literature is written by dead white males. Postmodernists think that’s explained by ‘oppression’ and ‘privilege’, but there are good reasons for it:
Whites have the highest IQ of any race (see the cold-climate theory of IQ).
Men are disproportionately represented at the extremes of intelligence (morons and geniuses): above the IQ level of 170, the genius level, there are thirty timesas many men as women. (Again, there are evolutionary reasons for this.)
Before writers are acknowledged to be great, their work must be subjected to the test of time, which outlasts any individual's lifespan.
Christianity
William E. Lecky, an atheist, makes the following point in his History of European Morals: ‘The vast change in the status of women must be manifest to all after Christianity had superseded the unlimited license of the pagan Empire.’ He mentions:
Christianity's absolute prohibition of sexual indulgence outside marriage
The security of wives by the prohibition of divorce
The legal rights of guardianship of children hitherto reserved to men
The inheritance of widows
"There can be little doubt that reverence for the Virgin Mary has done much to elevate and purify the ideal of woman and soften the manners of men."
The "redeeming and ennobling features of the age of chivalry which no succeeding change of habit or belief has wholly destroyed."
Also:
Christians preached that there was no separate baptism for men and women. All were one in Christ.
Christians did not expose baby girls at birth.
Christians honoured women who defied emperors, centurions and soldiers to witness to the Faith.
Christians were the first to educate women.
Christians were the first to have separate prison cells for men and women.
Today, August 5th, is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death. What follows is a post from 13 June 2009.
………………..
Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962:
. . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and of tragedy, of misused humanity.
He’s right of course: Monroe’s was a life wasted on glamour, sexiness, and frivolity. She serves as a lovely
warning: Make good use of your human incarnation! Be in the flesh, but not of the flesh.
The fascination with empty celebrity, a fascination as inane as its object, says something about what we have become in the West. We in some measure merit the revulsion of the Islamic world. We value liberty, and rightly, but we fail to make good use of it as Marilyn and Anna Nicole Smith failed to make good use of their time in the body. Curiously enough, a failure to make good use of one's time in the body often leads to its early destruction, and with it, perhaps, the possibility of spiritual improvement.
Curiously, Merton and Carradine both died in Bangkok, the first of accidental electrocution on 10 December 1968, the second a few days ago apparently of autoerotic asphyxiation. The extremity and perversity of the latter practice is a clear proof of the tremendous power of the sex drive to corrupt and derange the human spirit if it is allowed unfettered expression. One with any spiritual sensitivity and depth ought to shudder at the thought of ending his life in the manner of Carradine, in the heteronomy and diremption of the flesh, utterly enslaved to one's lusts, one's soul emptied out into the dust. To risk one's very life in pursuit of intensity of orgasm shows a mind unhinged. Thinking of Carradine's frightful example, one ought to pray, as Merton did thousands of times: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus. Nunc et in hora mortis.
James Burton is the legendary sideman responsible for those deceptively simple but perfect guitar solos on such early Rick Nelson recordings as Hello Mary Lou and Travelin' Man and It's Up to You.
Here Burton trades licks with Bruce Springsteen under the watchful eye of Roy Orbison. By the way, "Pretty Woman," blending as it does the Dionysian with the tender is a candidate for the office of perfect R & R song.
Playing "Johnny B. Goode" with E. P.
