Author: Bill Vallicella

The Axis of the Human Heart

Rod Dreher quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

This free Substack article by Dreher is one of his finest. Please do read it for your own good. And read it all: pay attention to the account of the unspeakable savagery of the American Indians, a savagery typically downplayed or unmentioned by leftists.

Billionaire Donors Withholding Loot from Leftist Seminaries

Long-time donors are finally waking up to the wokeassery* of once-great universities that have for decades been transmogrifying into leftist seminaries. ('Seminary' is etymologically related to 'semen' and in the seminaries in question the origin of the jism is masturbatory: nothing productive comes from these seed beds.)

I predicted the donor revolt on 13 October about a week after the Hamas savagery of 7 October. Case in point: Leon Cooperman.  He's given some $50 mil to Columbia but will give no more citing the cranial feculence (my polite phrase, not his) of the Hamas-supporting  students. 

What is astonishing to many of us, however, is how the Cooperman cohort could be so clueless for so long. Cooperman just now discovered what has been going on since the '60s, namely, the "long march through the institutions"? Only now you decide to stop funding the anti-civilizational scum?

Better late than never, but no fool like an old fool.

Copperman's 80. The elderly tend to live in the past.  They tend to be fat, lazy, complacent, inattentive, and lost in the petty particulars of their self-centered quotidian round, even if they are not, like Joey B., physically decrepit, non compos mentis, morally corrupt to the core, and a disaster for the USA and the world.

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*A coinage of mine which I am sure has occurred to others. Modelled on jackassery, a word recognized by Merriam-Webster. The donkey or jackass is the symbol, an aptro-symbol if you will, of the Democrat party in the USA which, once respectable, is now hard-Left and destructive of our republic as she was founded to be.

Notes on Anarchism I: R. P. Wolff on Authority

Top o' the Stack. One of my better efforts. First in a series.

Robert Paul Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism (Harper 1970, 1976) is a good book by a clear thinker and master expositor. Here is a first batch of interpretive and critical notes. I use double quotation marks when I am quoting an actual person such as Wolff. Single quotation marks are employed for scaring, sneering, and mentioning. I am punctilious to the point of pedantry about the use-mention distinction. Numerals in parentheses denote pages in Wolff's text. 'W' abbreviates 'Wolff.'

1. Overview. W's thesis is that "the concept of a de jure legitimate state" is "vacuous" and that "philosophical anarchism" is "the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man." (19) W. proceeds by first explaining the concepts of authority and autonomy and then arguing that they are irreconcilable. The upshot is that the state lacks moral justification. This entry is about authority. It will be followed by two more, one on autonomy, and one on their conflict.

Mike Pence ‘Suspends’ his Campaign

Here: 

"I came here to say it’s become clear to me this is not my time. So after much deliberation I have decided to suspend my campaign for president effective today," he said onstage. "

It'll never be your time, pal. You're a superannuated relic of a time long gone. Good riddance. Your use of the weasel word 'suspend'  fits well with the slipperiness of the professional pol. It beggars understanding that anyone would fund your campaign.

Pence called for federal abortion legislation to establish a 15-week minimum national standard . . . . 

The fool seems unaware that the abortion question was returned to the states by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. To call for federal abortion legislation after the 2022 Dobbs decision makes no sense at all.  Or am I missing something? It is hard to believe that a seasoned and well-connected politician such as Pence could be either that stupid or that ignorant.

Is it not more likely that I am missing some nuance of the law?

‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Hoplophobia’

A very polite Substack chiding of the stupid and often vicious use of these terms. My entry shows how to make a point rationally and stylishly without any use of invective and only the slightest trace of sarcasm. You have to cultivate the ability to write in a civil and respectful way. But you must also know how to pummel and deride scum like the present POTUS and his sorry entourage who, in their willful self-enstupidation, mindlessly repeat phrases they have heard with nary a concern for what they mean or ought to mean.

Different strokes for different folks. Sweet reason for some; the hard fist of unreason for others. The 'hard fist' comes in two flavors, one verbal, the other meta-verbal. 

Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House

Mike Johnson appears to be a good pick for Speaker of the House.  And better than McCarthy. Matt Gaetz vindicatus est.

The Gaetz Gambit, to give it a name, led to a win.  A 'win for White' I am tempted to say, pursuing the chess metaphor, except that that way of putting it will be condemned by the benighted as 'racist.' So let me put it this way: The Gaetz Gambit led to a win for the forces of Light over the forces of Darkness.

Here Johnson is grilling that master of Orwellian mendacity, Alejandro Mayorkas. Why 'Orwellian'? Because, as Mayorkas said on a different occasion, 'The border is secure as we define secure." That sort of verbal malfeasance is characteristic of the Orwellian inversion. Other examples: War is peace; freedom is slavery; dependence on welfare is self-reliance. The pattern: X, which is not Y, is Y.

And here Johnson exposes that lying crapweasel Merrick Garland. As Speaker of the House Johnson cannot refer to Garland as a 'crapweasel,' and probably would not in any case given his personable and mild-mannered style of self-presentation. But Johnson on Hannity's 26 October show  did say, and I paraphrase from memory, that Garland is the worst Attorney General in the history of the republic.  That interview was fabulously good. Is it online yet? 

It is indeed.

UPDATE 10/31

Johnson is driving the Left crazy:

Ahead of his sudden ascension to House speaker late last week, the media had little time to vet Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., thoroughly. And because he sucks in so many ways, it's been hard for his critics to settle on one of his many evil inclinations to focus on. He's a Christian nationalist. He's an election denier. He wants to destroy Medicare and Social Security. He's a fan of neo-Nazi conspiracy theories. As Brian Beutler of Off Message writes, "typecasting an opposition leader" may be tedious, but it's politically necessary. Democrats have benefited from the fact that the most famous Republican villains have one standout trait that defines their personality: Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is a pugnacious bully. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is a loudmouthed Karen. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California is a spineless suck-up.

Israel’s Draconian Gun Laws

This surprised me.

Why would Jews, who are smart, be so stupid about firearms? The Jews in Israel are surrounded by people who do not hide the fact that they intend to exterminate them and who believe that they are required to do so by their benighted religion. How could anyone fail to grasp that the right to life, which is an individual, not a group, right entails the individual's right to self-defense and therewith the right to acquire appropriate means thereto?  How could anyone fail to grasp that no government could possibly protect every citizen needing protection from lethal threats, especially the citizens of a state beleaguered by ruthless enemies on all sides?  Read on for some insight into the roots of this madness.

Continue reading “Israel’s Draconian Gun Laws”

LiChess: A Free Chess Site to Rival the ICC

Chess is a beautiful thing, a gift of the gods, an oasis of sanity in an insane world. Thanks to Traitor Joe and the chucklephuckery of his supporters, we are teetering on the brink of WW3. It is an exciting time to be alive in part because it may prove to be an exiting time. If you need a break from the madness, Caissa's arms beckon.

I've been patzin' around at LiChess the last few days under the handle, SeldomSeenSlim. My preferred time control is three-minute blitz with a two-second increment. That way, I do not take too much time from my other, my main mistress, fair Philosophia.

Boethius and Philosophia

Three Notes on David Mamet

Top o' the Stack.

The third note sends the reader to How the Democrats betrayed the Jews. Mamet is right about the Dems. He also rightly notes that Christianity bears some responsibility for anti-semitism:

It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE. Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.

It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

John 8:44 is quite a passage. You should crack open your New Testament and read it in context.

Martin Luther's role in the spread of anti-semitism cannot be gainsaid. I am currently reading Heiko A. Oberman's surpassingly excellent Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 2006) wherein we read, on p. 294:

Three days before his death Luther added an "Admonition against the Jews" to his last sermon, held in Eisleben on February 15, 1546. It clearly illustrates the change Luther had undergone in old age. There had been no transformation of friendship into enmity; only the measures proposed for an effective policy of improvement and and conversion had changed: "The Jews are our public enemies; they do not cease to defame Christ our Lord, to call the Virgin Mary a whore and Christ a bastard, and if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so. And they often do." Nevertheless, "we want to practice Christian love toward them and pray that they convert." 

Luther's anti-semitism was softened by Christian charity; not so the Palestinian Authority's.

PA: All mosques must teach that extermination of Jews is an Islamic imperative.

Don’t Vote for ANY Democrat

That may sound extreme, but it is not extreme at all.

The Dems vote as a bloc. They are under party discipline. They are made to toe the party line and punished if they don't. To understand the contemporary Democrat party you need to study communism.  Frank S. Meyer's The Moulding of Communists is one of the best works with which to begin your education. 

The CPUSA couldn't win under the banner of the Hammer and Sickle, but they are winning under the sign of the Jackass. So don't be a jackass. Don't vote for any Dem at any level, federal, state, local.

Vote the party, not the person. 

Young Man’s Bible, Old Man’s Bible

HitchhikerWhen he was a young man he travelled around the country with On the Road, the 'Bible of the Beat Generation,' in his rucksack, just as Kerouac had with Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible in his. Now the young man is old. Now when he travels he carries a different light paperback, the plain old Bible.

 

And he says a prayer for the soul of a lonesome traveller who quit the via dolorosa on this date 54 years ago thereby securing his release from the samsaric meat wheel and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).