Category: Blogging

The Two Kinds of People and the Manifold Uses of Blogging

I once worked as a mail handler at the huge Terminal Annex postal facility in downtown Los Angeles. I was twenty or twenty one. An old black man, thinking to instruct me in the ways of the world, once said to me, "Beell, dey is basically two kahnds a people in dis world, the fuckahs and the fuckees, and you gonna have to decide which side you gonna be on." This morning I found the thought expressed with a bit more elegance by Giacomo Leopardi (1798- 1837) in his Pensieri:

The human race, from the individual on up, is split into two camps: the bullies and the bullied. Neither law nor force of any kind, nor advancement in civilization and philosophy, can prevent men now or in the future from belonging to one of these two camps. So, he who can choose, must choose. Although not everyone is able, nor is the choice always available. (Pensieri [Thoughts], tr. Di Piero, Louisiana State University Press, 1981, p. 69)

Am I endorsing the alternative?  No. I am merely presenting it for your consideration.

My posts are not all of the same type. Some are just notes to myself, records of what I am reading and thinking about. Others are meant to draw the reader's attention to this or that for his edification or delectation. Some carefully argue a thesis I believe to be true. Others merely assert a thesis I believe to be true. Some are sloppy and impressionistic. In others, the rigor mentis approaches rigor mortis.

Some posts are aphoristic. But don't assume that an aphorism cannot have deep and rigorous and systematic thought at its origin. Some posts are polemical. There are people who do not occupy the space of reasons so that attempting to engage them in that space is a fool's errand. They are in need of defeat or perhaps therapy, not rational persuasion. The verbal equivalent of a blow to the head or a kick in the ass will do them more good than a patient setting-forth of reasons beyond their comprehension.

The uses of blogging are manifold.

Thank You Zoe Pollock of The Daily Dish

When I logged on yesterday, I was surprised to see that my readership was way up: by the end of the day I had logged 2,698 page views for the day.  That's about double what I was getting the few days preceding.  Here is the link from Zoe Pollock. 

Hell, if I knew she was going to link to that meditation on death and Hitchens, I would have polished it.  Almost everything I post on this site is first-draftish.  That is the nature of the 'sport' of blogging.  The idea is to see if you can bang out something interesting, substantive, penetrating, muscular yet elegant, without spending the whole day doing it.

I have been blogging for over six years now on a daily basis. Something tells me I'm in it for the duration.  It has added very considerably to the quality of my life, especially because of the likeminded friends I have made.  You guys know who you are.  The social networking that the Internet makes possible solves a very nasty problem of human relations:  How can one find people one can relate to?

We Philosophize Best With Friends

Aristotle says that somewhere, but I forgot where.  In any case, it is true as I verified once again yesterday in Tempe, where I met up with Steven Nemes, Mike Valle, Peter Lupu and his student Scott.  Before joining them I stopped at the library where I borrowed Thomas McKay's Plural Predication and Douglas Hyde's I Believed. 

The conversation went on for about five hours from 2 to 7.  The 19 year old Nemes has made a fairly thorough study of my book on existence (see here for links to the ten posts he has written about it) and we discussed some topics from the book.  He really understands me, and has a keen eye for problems potential and actual.  I jokingly call Nemes my nemesis.  We also discussed free will and Biblical inerrancy.  Steven floated some interesting ideas that he then today began to work out in this post.

It occurred to me today that Peter and I, sitting and smoking out in front of the Churchill cigar emporium, did a good job of instantiating the role of Sidewalk Socrates, a role Peter learned from his friend and teacher, Sidney Morgenbesser.  "There are people who have a passion for discourse, who are addicted to debate, who live in a world of constant conversation, and Morgenbesser was among the purest examples of the type."  The description fits Peter as well.  But I chided Peter for being a 'corrupter of youth' when he offered Steven cigarettes.

 

Don Colacho’s Aphorisms

Ah, the webbiness of the Web!  I used an aphorism of Nicolás Gómez Dávila three days ago for purposes of logical analysis and received a comment from one 'Stephen' who is the proprietor of an interesting site devoted to translations of Don Colacho's aphorisms.  The blog is appropriately entitled Don Colacho's Aphorisms.  Please do check it out if you are a lover of aphorisms.  His are even better than mine, if I do say so myself.  Here is an example:

“Social” is the adjective that serves as a pretext for all swindles.

Excellent! If I may be permitted to supply an example: social justice.

Another good aphorist is Deogolwulf, proprietor of The Joy of Curmudgeonry.  Here is an example of one of his fewtrils:  "The common man is never so clever as the politician says and never so stupid as the politician believes."

John Pepple on the Need for a Cultural Revolution

I drew your attention to John Pepple's weblog, I Want a New Left, a few days ago.  Pepple identifies himself as a leftist, but what's in a label?  If he were characteristic of leftists, which he isn't, I would  have little or no problem with them.  I find myself wholly in agreement with his post, We Need a Cultural Revolution.  His topic is violent crime among the poor, and how the rebellious attitudes propagated by the 'Sixties Left have had terrible consequences for the poor without harming the well-off who spread the pernicious attitudes and who, after sloughing off their rebelliousness, slid comfortably back into the establishment.  Excerpts, emphasis added:

The problem goes back to that cultural revolution called the Sixties, because this sort of thing [extreme gang violence] did not happen before that decade. Part of that decade was the rise of the left’s cultural dominance, and the left (whether the old left or the new left) has always been soft on crime. Pushing poor people into crime makes sense to the left because such criminals are seen by them as heroes against the evil capitalists. But in fact poor people who turn to crime basically rob other poor people, which means that the total gain for the poor is zero. Moreover, once businesses in poor neighborhoods realize they have to deal with criminals, they raise prices, either because they have to hire more security people or because they have to compensate for the goods lost through theft. Once again, this doesn’t really help the poor.

That is spot on.  Leftists coddle criminals and the unproductive while penalizing productive behavior via taxation and regulation.  But by attacking those who create wealth, they make everyone poorer.  Fetishizers of equality, leftists would rather have everyone poor and equal rather than tolerate inequalities that benefit the worst off.

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John Pepples Wants a New Left

During our lazy float down the Rio Salado today, Mike Valle and I had a lot to talk about. He mentioned a new blog he had come across entitled I Want a New Left. The author, John Pepples, aims to develop a self-critical leftism.  Now, having read quickly through most of his posts, I am a bit puzzled by the same thing that puzzles Mike:  why does Pepples hang on to the 'leftism' label?

But labels aren't that important.  What is important are the issues and one's stances on them. On that score, conservatives like me and Mike share common ground with Pepples.  In his biographical statement he says that in college he majored in mathematics and took a lot of physics courses. "But this was during the late 60s and early 70s, when much questioning was occurring, and I ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  Sounds very familiar!  The 'sixties were a heady time, a time of ferment, during which indeed "much questioning was occurring."  I started out in Electrical Engineering but also "ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  I did, however, have a bit more luck career-wise and didn't experience the same difficulties getting into print.

Why did so many of us 60s types end up in philosophy?  Because we were lost in a strange land, traditional understandings and forms of world-orientation having left us without guidance, and we needed to ascend to a vantage point to reconnoiter the terrain, the vantage point that philosophy alone provides.

Political change, a species of the genus doxastic change, is a fascinating topic.  I recently stumbled upon an effort by a distaff blogger who documents her transition from a comfortable enclave of mutually reinforcing Democrats to the more open world of contemporary conservatism, and the hostility with which her turncoat behavior was rewarded.  She calls her blog Neo-Neocon.

The ‘Stickiness’ Metric

'Stickiness' is a measure of the average length of time a reader remains at a website.  Personally, I am more impressed by the 'stickiness' of a site than its raw traffic (measured in unique visitors and page views).  Here at TaxProf Blog is  a ranking of the 'stickiest' law prof blogs.  (Via Legal Insurrection.) Ladder Man will no doubt gnash his teeth over the fact that Volokh Conspiracy is in the number one slot handily beating out his two blogs.  It comes as no surprise that Instapundit is first in traffic but last in 'stickiness.' 

Why is Ladder Man so-called?  Because he is a status-obsessed careerist, a  social climber, given  to ranking things.  You won't find much by way of content at his academic gossip site. 

I Finally Get My BlogRoll Rolling

I am lazy, a man of leisure, a slacker before slackers were so-called, but not particularly arrogant.  So don't take it as arrogance that I have until just recently expanded the blogroll of this, the third major incarnation of Maverick Philosopher, beyond one entry.  Well, maybe some arrogance is involved in consequence of an upsurge in readership:  who really and thoroughly knows the inner workings of his own psyche?  (But knowing the limits of self-knowledge is important self-knowledge.)

In any case, scroll down til near the end of the right-hand sidebar and you will find some links.  They are mostly links to the sites of friends I have made over the years via this wonderful medium.  Some I have had the pleasure of meeting in the flesh.  Some I hope to meet.  Those who appear in the 'sphere under their real names I list by their names.  Others I list by their weblog names. 

My friends in other disciplines should not feel slighted.  I'll get around to you eventually.

Varieties of Cyber-Linkage

The symmetrical linker links to every site that links to him. The asymmetrical linker links to no site that links to him. The nonsymmetrical linker may or may not link to a site that links to him.

The totally reflexive linker links to all and only those sites that are identical to his site. The totally reflexive linker is also known as a windowless monad. All his links are internal or on-site. The partially reflexive linker links to himself, but only on condition that some other site links to him. The irreflexive linker links to no site that is identical to his site. All of his links are external or off-site. The transitive linker links to every site that is the target of a link of every site to which he links, and to every site that is the target of the target of every site to which he links, and so on. That way lies madness.

The moderate cyber-onanist is a person with two or more sites all of which are weakly interlinked, where two or more sites are weakly interlinked if and only if each site is symmetrically linked to one of the others. The extreme cyber-onanist is a person with two or more sites, all of which are strongly interlinked, where two or more sites are strongly interlinked if and only if each site is symmetrically linked to each of the others. The solipsistic cyber-onanist is a cyber-onanist (whether extreme or moderate) all of whose links are internal. The incorrigible cyber-onanist is an extreme solipsistic cyber-onanist.

Maverick Philosopher 6th Blogiversary

Some say that blogging is dead.  Read or unread, whether by sages or fools, I shall blog on.  A post beats a twit tweet any day, and no day without a post.  Nulla dies sine linea.   It is too early to say of blogging what Etienne Gilson said of philosophy, namely, that it always buries its undertakers, but I am hopeful.  After all, a weblog is just an online journal, and journal scribbling has flourished most interestingly for centuries.  To put it romantically, blogging is a vehicle for the relentless quotidian sifting, seeking, and questing for sense and truth and reality without which some of us would find life meaningless.

This, the fourth version of Maverick Philosopher, was begun on 31 October 2008.  Since that time it has racked up  459446 Lifetime Pageviews, 835.36 Pageviews/Day, 1463 Total Posts, and 2685 Total Comments.

I thank you for your patronage.

Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

My name is William F. Vallicella, I have the doctorate in philosophy (Boston College, 1978), and I have published a couple of books and 70 or so articles in the professional journals. A confirmed blogger in the grip of cacoethes scribendi, I’ve been online since May 2004 on various platforms.  This is MavPhil Gen IV.  I publish online here, at Substack, on Facebook, and at X.  I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric “Philosophy in Progress.” The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and provides a list of my professional publications. 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. 

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (Terentius) “I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me.” 

Motto: “Study everything, join nothing.” (Paul Brunton)

Comment Policy: This site is not a discussion board.  Comments must address directly what the author says or what the commenters say.  Other comments will not be allowed to appear. Comments should be pithy and to the point. In these hyperkinetic times, the regnant abbreviation is TL;DR.  If you are a cyberpunk needing to take a data dump, please relieve yourself elsewhere.

My politics?  From Democrat to Dissident

Political Burden of Proof: As contemporary ‘liberals’ become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

 

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