Author: Bill Vallicella

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Burdens, Loads, Weights, and Weltschmerz

Rolling Stones, Beast of Burden

Jackson Browne, The Load Out

The Band, The Weight

To sully this great song with a reference to Fani Willis would be criminal.

Allman Bros., Not My Cross to Bear

ZZ Top, Got Me Under Pressure

Jeff Beck and ZZ Top, Sixteen Tons

Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers. The clue to the meaning of this great song lies in the reference to Jack London's Martin Eden.

Jackson Browne. The Pretender. This one goes out to Darci M and the summer of '78.

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet

Shadows are falling, and I've been here all day
It's too hot to sleep, and time is running away
Feel like my soul has, turned into steel
I've still got the scars, that the sun didn't heal
There's not even room enough, to be anywhere

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

Well, my sense of humanity, has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing, there's been some kind of pain
She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing, what was in her mind
I just don't see why I should even care

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

Well, I've been to London, and I've been to gay Paris
I've followed the river, and I got to the sea
I've been down on the bottom, of a world full of lies
I ain't lookin for nothing, in anyone's eyes
Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

I was born here, and I'll die here, against my will
I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still
Every nerve in my body, is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was, I came here to get away from
Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

 

Taqiyya

Gaza's Health Ministry said the Palestinian death toll from the war has climbed to 30,320. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its figures, but says women and children make up around two-thirds of those killed.

That many? Could be. But the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya gives one a reason to be skeptical.

I have no doubt, however, that many more Gazans have died than Israelis. But whose fault is that? 'Gazan' is a more accurate moniker than 'Palestinian,' don't you agree?

Here is a related article by Dennis Prager.

Sam Francis on Anarcho-Tyranny

From a 1994 Chronicles article:

This condition, which in some of my columns I have called “anarcho-tyranny,” is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent. 

[. . .]

In fact, we criminalize the innocent all the time in the United States today—through asset seizure laws that confiscate your property even before you’re convicted of possessing illegal drugs; through mandatory brainwashing programs designed to reconstruct your mind with “sensitivity training,” “human relations,” and rehabilitation if you display politically incorrect ideas on certain occasions; through prosecuting people like Bernhard Goetz who use guns to defend themselves; and through gun control laws in general. Under anarcho-tyranny, gun control laws do not usually target criminals who use guns to commit their crimes. The usual suspects are noncriminals who own, carry, or use guns against criminals—like the Korean store owners in Los Angeles or like Mr. Goetz, who spent several months in jail after picking off the three hoodlums who were making ready to liberate him from life and limb.

Sound familiar? That was 30 years ago. Things are worse now. And you are still a Democrat? 

How many of you remember Bernie Goetz?

Suggestibility and the Language Lemming

The language lemming hears a word or phrase, thinks it 'cool,' and just has to use it whether or not it makes sense. 'Demo' below is being used as an abbreviation of 'demolish.' Now there is something dubious about the excessive use of abbreviations these days, but let that pass.  The point I want to make is that, below, the correct word is 'replace' not 'demolish.'  Of course, you, or rather a highly suggestible 'liberal' language lemming, could demolish a carpet that has been removed, although  it is not clear how one would go about doing that.  The point is that a replacement is not a demolition.

Does language matter? Well, does it matter if we refer to illegal aliens as 'migrants'? If not, then it won't matter that 'migrant' is now being replaced by 'newcomer.'

 

Demo the carpet

The Ambiguity of Vows

Vows make for stability of life and put a brake on the mercurial and fickle in us. They must be taken seriously or not taken at all. But rigid commitments immaturely or prematurely entered into  are sometimes better broken than kept. Sometimes, not often. Rigidity and flexibility, both physical and psychological, are values, competing values. Each deserves its due. The topic of competing values is rich and deep and insufficiently explored. More grist for the mill. 

A ‘Deplorable’ Straight from Central Casting . . .

. . . 'calls out' the lying leftist scumbag mayor of Athens, Georgia. James Lee takes on Kelly Gertz.  Was this staged? No, but it certainly looks that way. One of Hillary's 'deplorables' with a redneck hat, poor English, and missing a tooth rightly attacks a mendacious SOB whose first name is 'Kelly.' 

Getting Tough with Our Political Enemies

If we get tough with them politically, then we may be able to avoid having to get tough with them extra-politically. Let's hope and pray that we only have to prepare to enter the extra-political and not actually go there. For it won't be pretty.

But I see no good reason to be particularly sanguine. The Muse of Blog must be with me this morning: 'sanguine' is exactly the right word. 

Fragility and Mortality

A piece of glass is fragile in that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. But there is no inevitability in any fragile object's ever breaking. There is no necessity that the disposition be realized. A chocolate bar is disposed to melt in certain circumstances.  It has this disposition at every time at which it exists. But it might never be realized: the bar might cease to exist, not by melting, but by being eaten.

Mortality is different. To be mortal is not to be dead, or moribund, but to be liable to die, apt to die, disposed to die. In his last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens, dying of cancer, says that we are all dying. That is not true. What is true is that we are all disposed to die. Every animal, even in the full bloom of heath and fitness, bears within itself this disposition. Its realization, however, is inevitable.

These points are relevant to the evaluation of the Epicurean argument which some dismiss as a sophism: when death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. So death, where is thy sting? The argument seems to ignore the fact that the disposition to die is when I am and at every moment I am, and that therein lies the 'sting.'

We should come back to this.

Civilization Versus the New Nihilists

 Victor Davis Hanson

Put the question to your friends and acquaintances: Which side are you on? If they are not on the side of civilization, cut them off.  Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? If enough of us ostracize enough of them, this will have an effect.  (The usual ceteris paribus qualifications apply.)

Here's my take from 2017:

The Nihilism of the Left

Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:

Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.

The Muslim as the new proletarian.

The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)

Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.

It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.

………………..

And here is another by my man Hanson, the writing machine, on the insanity of leftists.  It's on the russia, Russia, RUSSIA! hoax. To hell with these TDS-ers and their self-induced lunacy.  They don't seem to grasp that they have a moral obligation to exercise due diligence in the formation of their beliefs. That is an obligation that they regularly flout. 

There is just no moral or intellectual equivalence between Right and Left.