Current Affairs – Page 9 – Maverick Philosopher

Charles Koch

Perhaps you have heard of those nefarious behind-the-scenes operators, the shadowy Koch Brothers. To get an initial taste of just how evil they are, see here.

An Observation on Last Night’s Democrat Debate: Bernie’s Generosity

I could stomach only about an hour's worth of it.

What struck me was Bernie Sanders' generous political self-immolation vis-à-vis Mrs. Clinton. He handed her the nomination by agreeing with her about the e-mail server (non)-issue. And the crowd loved it. (Is there a lesson here for Republicans?)

Here is my take on Sanders. He is basically a decent man who, though personally ambitious as every successful politician must be, nevertheless puts the good of the country, as he sees it, above his own personal ambitions. He is deeply rooted in principles that he honestly believes are correct. For him climate change, economic inequality, women's 'reproductive rights' and the rest are the real issues. And so he nobly took the high road to his own political marginalization by agreeing with Hillary that the e-mail server business is but a distraction from these real issues. After all, he could have justifiably attacked her on this very serious matter to bolster support for his nomination. He didn't.

If you're a 'progressive,' why vote for him when she is as much of a socialist and toes the politically correct line on guns to boot? (Nice pun, eh?)

Of course, there is another angle. Perhaps Bernie was playing the sycophant in hopes of a slot in the Hillary admin. But I don't think so. I really think he is a high-minded fellow with foolish and deleterious ideas. I could be wrong about the high-minded part.

By the way, we shouldn't be too harsh on our politicians. They are in the arena. They stand there, out in the open, under their own names, not hiding behind pseudonyms, exposed to the slings and arrows of a vast commentariat. They have courage. For this they deserve some respect. Even Hillary. Even Obama. Even the worst of them. For our worst are better than [you fill in the blank].

UPDATE (15 October): Daniel Henninger of WSJ agrees with me. He's a smart guy!

UPDATE (16 October): And Krauthammer too! Another smart guy. Nice tidbit:

The other three candidates hardly registered. Lincoln Chafee, currently polling at 0.3 points (minus-10 Celsius), played Ross Perot’s 1992 running mate, Admiral James Stockdale, who opened his vice presidential debate with: “Who am I? Why am I here?”

Flag Burning, Muhammad Mockery, and a Double Standard

If a coalition of what some leftists call knuckle-draggers (including rednecks, bigoted white working stiffs, those who "cling to their guns and Bibles," in the derisive words of Obama) were to slaughter flag burners, the leftists would howl in protest, pointing out (rightly) that flag burning counts as protected speech in these United States. They would not 'blame the victims' for having provoked or incited the knuckle-draggers. They would insist that flag burning is protected speech and take the reasonable view that murdering people for their (benighted) views is far, far worse than the desecration perpetrated by the protesters.

Mirabile dictu, however, lefties pull a 180 when it comes to the celebration of free speech practiced by people like Pamela Geller. Suddenly people who are exercising free speech rights are castigated for doing so, and warned about inciting violence.

What we have here is a classic double standard. One standard of evaluation is applied to flag burners, who tend to be on the Left, and a very different one is applied to Muhammad mockers, who tend to be conservatives. This double standard is particularly offensive, even more offensive that the usual lefty double standard, because flag burning and cartooning are very different.

Ought flag burning come under the rubric of protected speech? Logically prior question: Is it speech at all? What if I make some such rude gesture in your face as 'giving you the finger.' Is that speech? If it is, I would like to know what proposition it expresses. 'Fuck you!' does not express a proposition. Likewise for the corresponding gesture with the middle finger. And if some punk burns a flag, I would like to know what proposition the punk is expressing. The Founders were interested in protecting reasoned dissent, but the typical act of flag burning by the typical leftist punk does not rise to that level. To have reasoned or unreasoned dissent there has to be some proposition that one is dissenting from and some counter-proposition that one is advancing, and one's performance has to make more or less clear what those propositions are. Without going any further into this issue, let me just express my skepticism at arguments that try to subsume gestures and physical actions under speech.

Cartooning is very different. Cartoons have propositional content. The above cartoon expresses various propositions. It expresses the proposition that Muhammad is a war-like individual who is willing to put to the sword someone who merely draws his image. It also expresses the cartoonist's opinion that such a vile and backward view ought to be opposed.

If you fart, do you express a proposition? No doubt you ex-press foul gases from your gastrointestinal tract. Could it be that the stupidity of contemporary liberals derives from an incapacity to distinguish these two types of expression? Speech worth protecting is not gassing-off.

Finally, there is the irony that we conservatives are the new liberals. It is we who defend toleration and free speech, classical concerns of old-time liberals, while the 'liberals' of the present day have degenerated to the level of fascists of the Left.

What would be left of the Left were they made bereft of their double standards? There are so many of them. We need a list.

Another Double Standard

Update and Correction (5/13):

Dennis Monokroussos comments:

The Obama quote is that they “cling to guns or [not “and”] religion [not “Bibles”]”. As for the cartoon, it doesn’t express the proposition you relate in the body of the post. It, or something very close to it, is clearly the idea that the cartoonist has in mind, but that isn’t in the cartoon itself. If, however, one is allowed to draw the inference we all do from the cartoon, then it’s not obvious to me that one is also allowed to fill in the obvious connotations of one giving the middle finger or saying “F*** you!” or from the burning of the flag.

Dennis is right to correct my faulty quotation of Obama. See this short video clip. But while I did not reproduce Obama's words verbatim, I did convey their sense. After all, with 'religion' he was certainly not referring to Islam! Besides, 'cling to guns' and 'cling to Bibles' makes clear sense; it is less clear how one could 'cling' to religion. So you could say I was charitably presenting Obama's idea in better linguistic dress than he himself presented it. But Dennis is right: I should have checked the quotation.

Can a cartoon, by itself, express a proposition? No. So Dennis is technically correct. I almost made that point myself but thought it ill-advised to muddy my point with a technicality. Cartoons, in this respect, are like sentences. No sentence, even if in the indicative mood, by itself expresses a proposition. 'Peter smokes,' for example, is a declarative sentence. But it does not express a proposition unless it is assertively uttered by someone in a definite context that makes clear who the referent of 'Peter' is.

It is interesting to note that a mere tokening of the sentence type is not enough. Suppose I am teaching English. I utter the sentence 'Peter smokes' merely as an example of a declarative sentence. I have produced a token of the type, but I have not expressed a proposition.

Charity Navigator on The Clinton Foundation

Here. According to Peter Schweizer, only about 10% of what the Clinton Foundation takes in in donations goes to the people in need. But since Bill and Hillary are known by all to be ethically above reproach, Schweizer must be lying.

Free Speech: Is It Always Right to Say What One has a Right to Say?

It is not always right to say what one has a right to say.

Thus one of my aphorisms. It is worth unpacking, however, especially in the light of the incident at Garland, Texas.

First of all, the following is not a logical contradiction: You have a right to say X but you ought not say X. For you may have a legal right, but no moral right, or what you have a legal right to say may be highly imprudent to say. In fact, it may be so imprudent that moral and not merely prudential considerations become relevant.

So while Pamela Geller & Co. undoubtedly had the legal right to express themselves by hosting a cartoon fest in mockery of Muhammad, it is at least a legitimate question, one whose answer is not obvious, whether their doing so was morally acceptable.

On the one side are those who say that it was not morally acceptable given the high likelihood that violence would erupt. Indeed, that is what happened. Luckily, however, the Muslim savages¹ were shot dead, and only one non-savage was wounded. But it might have been worse, much worse. Innocent passersby might have been caught in the cross-fire; the shooter who dispatched the Islamist fanatics might not have been such a good shot and a long melee may have ensued; the Islamists might have shown up with heavier armament and killed all the cartoonists; they might have laid waste to the entire neighborhood, etc. We know from bitter world-wide experience what the barbarians of Islam are capable of. Do you recall, for example, the Taliban's destruction of the ancient Buddhist statuary?

On the other side are those who insist that we must not engage in what they call 'self-censorship.' We must not limit or curtail the free exercise of our liberties in the face of savages who behead people because of a difference in political and theological views.

So what is the correct view?

Suppose that Muslim reaction to the mockery and defamation of their prophet was just as nonviolent as Christian reaction to the mockery and defamation of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Then I would condemn as immoral the mockery and defamation of Muhammad. I would invoke my aphorism above. There are things that one is legally entitled to say and do that one must not, morally speaking, say or do.

Example. There is no law against private drunkenness, nor should there be; but it is immoral to get drunk to the point of damaging the body. The same goes for gluttonous eating. Closer in, we cannot and ought not have laws regulating all the inter-personal exchanges in which people are likely to mock, insult, and generally show a lack of respect for one another. And yet it is in general surely wrong to treat people with a lack of respect even if the lack of respect remains on the verbal plane. If you don't accept these examples, provide your own. If you say that there are no examples, then you are morally and probably also intellectually obtuse and not in a position to profit from a discussion like this.

So if the Muslim and Christian reactions to mockery and defamation were both physically nonviolent, then, invoking my aphorism above, I would condemn the activities of Geller and Co. at Garland, Texas, and relevantly similar activities. But of course the reactions are not the same! Muslims are absurdly sensitive about their prophet and react in unspeakably barbaric ways to slights, real and imagined. Every Muslim? Of course not. (Don't be stupid.)

So I say we ought to defend Pamela Geller and her group.

My reason, again, is not that that I consider it morally acceptable to mock religious figures. After all, I condemned the Charlie Hebdo outfit and took serious issue with the misguided folk who marched around with Je Suis Charlie signs. Perpetually adolescent porno-punks should not be celebrated, but denounced. That the Islamo-head-chopper-offers are morally much worse than the porno-punks who make an idol of the free expression of their morally and intellectually vacuous narcissistic selves does not justify the celebration of the latter.

The reason to defend Geller is because, in the present circumstances in which militant Muslims and their leftist enablers attack the the values of the West — which are not just Western values, but universal values – including such values as free expression and toleration, the deadly threat from the Islamist barbarians justifies our taking extreme measure in defense of values whose implementation will prove beneficial for everyone, including Muslims and their benighted leftist fellow-travellers.

_________________

1. If you understand the English language, then you understand that 'Muslim savages' does not imply that all Muslims are savages any more than 'rude New Yorker' implies that all New Yorkers are rude.

The Foolish Suggestion of Starbuck’s Chief Executive Officer

Starbuck's CEO, Howard Schultz, wants his baristas to write "Race Together" on coffee cups to facilitate a conversation about race between baristas and customers and presumably also among customers.

Now this is profoundly stupid — assuming it is not just a cynical try at boosting sales. I'll be charitable and assume the former.

Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that we agree on less and less, and not for a lack of 'conversations' about the issues that divide us. The notion that more talk will help is foolish when what we need is less conversational engagement and more agreement to avoid divisive issues, together with the resolve to interact as well as we can on the common ground that remains — such as love of coffee.

Here there is (are) common ground(s)!

Bibi and Barry: Fundamental Differences

Daniel Greenfield:

In 1967, Benjamin Netanyahu skipped his high school graduation in Pennsylvania to head off to Israel to help in the Six Day War. That same year Obama moved with his mother to Indonesia.

When Obama suggested that Israel return to the pre-1967 borders, described by Ambassador Eban, no right-winger, as “Auschwitz borders,” it was personal for Netanyahu. Like many Israeli teens, he had put his life on hold and risked it protecting those borders.

In the seventies, Obama was part of the Choom Gang and Netanyahu was sneaking up on Sabena Flight 571 dressed as an airline technician. Inside were four terrorists who had already separated Jewish passengers and taken them hostage. Two hijackers were killed. Netanyahu took a bullet in the arm.

The Prime Minister of Israel defended the operation in plain language. “When blackmail like this succeeds, it only leads to more blackmail,” she said.

Netanyahu’s speech in Congress was part of that same clash of worldviews. His high school teacher remembered him saying that his fellow students were living superficially and that there was “more to life than adolescent issues.” He came to Congress to cut through the issues of an administration that has never learned to get beyond its adolescence.

Obama’s people had taunted him with by calling him “chickens__t.” They had encouraged a boycott of his speech and accused him of insulting Obama. They had thrown out every possible distraction to the argument he came to make. Unable to argue with his facts, they played Mean Girls politics instead.

Benjamin Netanyahu had left high school behind to go to war. Now he was up against overgrown boys and girls who had never grown beyond high school. But even back then he had been, as a fellow student had described him, “The lone voice in the wilderness in support of the conservative line.”

“We were all against the war in Vietnam because we were kids,” she said. The kids are still against the war. Against all the wars; unless it’s their own wars. Netanyahu grew up fast. They never did.

Netanyahu could have played their game, but instead he began by thanking Obama. His message was not about personal attacks, but about the real threat that Iran poses to his country, to the region and to the world. He made that case decisively and effectively as few other leaders could.

He did it using plain language and obvious facts.

Netanyahu reminded Congress that the attempt to stop North Korea from going nuclear using inspectors failed. The deal would not mean a denuclearized Iran. “Not a single nuclear facility would be demolished,” he warned. And secret facilities would continue working outside the inspections regime.

He quoted the former head of IAEA’s inspections as saying, “If there’s no undeclared installation today in Iran, it will be the first time in 20 years that it doesn’t have one.”

And Netanyahu reminded everyone that Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear program would be backed by ongoing development of its intercontinental ballistic missile program that would not be touched under the deal.

He warned that the deal would leave Iran with a clear path to a nuclear endgame that would allow it to “make the fuel for an entire nuclear arsenal” in “a matter of weeks”.

Iran’s mission is to export Jihad around the world, he cautioned. It’s a terrorist state that has murdered Americans. While Obama claims to have Iran under control, it has seized control of an American ally in Yemen and is expanding its influence from Iraq to Syria.

Its newly moderate government “hangs gays, persecutes Christians, jails journalists.” It’s just as bad as ISIS, except that ISIS isn’t close to getting a nuclear bomb.

“America’s founding document promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Iran’s founding document pledges death, tyranny, and the pursuit of jihad,” he said. It was the type of clarity that he had brought to the difficult questions of life as a teenager. It is a clarity that still evades Obama today.

Read the rest.

Robert Paul Wolff on Netanyahu

When the otherwise distinguished Robert Paul Wolff over at The Philosopher's Stone plays the stoned philosopher and quits the reservation of Good Sense, I call him 'Howlin' Wolff.' Hear him howl:

I need to say this. If anyone wants to call me a self-hating Jew, so be it.

Israel is far and away the militarily most powerful nation in the entire Middle East. It has a large, fully functional nuclear arsenal with appropriate delivery systems, and a well-trained army with a large Ready Reserve. If Israel wants to start a war with Iran, let it put its own young men and women at risk, instead of adopting a belligerant [sic] stance and inviting the United States to shed our blood and spend our treasure making good on Israel's threats.

Let me warm up with a bit of pedantry. 'Self-hating Jew' seems not quite the right expression. After all, a Jew who hates himself needn't hate himself because he is a Jew. He might hate himself, not in respect of his Jewishness, but in respect of some other attribute, say, that of being white. I recommend 'Jew-hating Jew.' On whether Wolff is one or not I have no opinion. You may also draw your own conclusions from Wolff's having penned Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.

But it is entirely typical of a delusional leftist to engage in the sort of Orwellian reversal expressed in the paragraph quoted above.

According to Wolff, Israel threatens Iran, and not the other way around. And it is Israel's "stance" that is "belligerent," not Iran's.

Israel is militarily supreme in the Middle East. It has nuclear war-making capacity. Iran doesn't, at least not yet. But so what?

I detect the typical leftist confusion of weapon and wielder, as if weapons themselves are the problem, not the character of their wielders. That, in tandem with some such silly equivalentism as that all actors are morally equivalent and that if one actor has nukes, then it is not fair that the others not have them. Should the U. N. provide them all around to 'level the playing field'?

I could go on, but my readers do not need their noses rubbed in the obvious.

Besides, some notions are beneath refutation. Their mere exposure suffices to refute them.

War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Less liberty is more liberty. Defense is attack. Concern for one's survival in a situation in which one's adversaries have threatened one with nuclear annihilation is belligerence. The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am not now and never have been a Jew either ethnically or religiously, nor an Israeli, nor do I have any intention of becoming the two of these three that it would be possible for me to become.

For what is perhaps my best response to Wolffian excess see Robert Paul (Howlin') Wolff in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Hanson on Obama on Netanyahu

Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.

Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta against a foreign head of state.

Love and Transformation

If you love something, would you want fundamentally to transform it?

A man meets a woman, gets to know her, and they decide to get married. On the eve of the nuptials, he announces to her that she is on the brink of a fundamental transformation. Would you say that he loved her or rather some idea of what he could make her into?

Now take a gander at this minute-and-a-half video clip.

Why the Firestorm? Rudy Spoke the Truth that Hurts and Punctured the Obama Myth

Why the furiously intemperate ranting over Rudy's remarks? After all, the distinguished former mayor of New York City merely articulated what vast numbers of us have suspected or believed for years. Giuliani had the temerity to speak truth to power and this enraged the Left. (Lefties think they alone own dissent and the right to speak truth to power.) Fred Siegel:

The ranting has obscured the reasons why so many Americans take Giuliani’s remarks to heart. Starting with his June 2009 speech in Cairo, when he apologized for American actions in the Middle East, Obama has consistently given credence to Islamic grievances against America while showing reluctance to confront Islamic terrorism. In 2009, after Major Nidal Hasan killed 13 American soldiers and wounded 40 others at Fort Hood while shouting “Allahu Akhbar,” the administration labeled the killings workplace violence. In recent months, the pace of evasions has quickened. Obama was the only major Western leader absent from the massive Paris march held in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings. Worse yet, Obama referred to the killings in a Jewish supermarket in Paris as “random” acts of violence.

But this was only the beginning of a string of curious comments and loopy locutions made by the president or his spokespeople in the weeks that followed. While ISIS rampaged across the Middle East, the president told a Washington prayer breakfast that Christians shouldn’t get on their “high horse,” because they were guilty of the Crusades, among other crimes. Not only were the Crusades many centuries past, but they were also a complicated matter in which both sides behaved barbarically.

But that is to understate the matter. Both Siegel and Giuliani failed to mention a crucial fact, namely, the Crusades were defensive wars, wars in response to Muslim aggression and conquest.

Continue reading “Why the Firestorm? Rudy Spoke the Truth that Hurts and Punctured the Obama Myth”

How About a Six-Month Suspension Without Pay for Barack Obama?

It's a funny world. NBC anchor Brian Williams lied about a matter of no significance, in an excess of boyish braggadocio, though in doing so he injured his credibility and, more importantly, that of his employer, NBC. We demand truth of our journalists and so Williams' suspension is as justified as the Schadenfreude at his come-down is not.

Journalists are expected to tell the truth. President Obama, however, lies regularly and reliably about matters of great significance and gets away with it. Part of it is that politicians are expected to lie. Obama does not disappoint, taking mendacity to unheard-of levels. There is a brazenness about it that has one admiring his cojones if nothing else. Another part of it is that politicians are not subject to the discipline of the market in the way news anchors are. Loss of credibility reduces viewership which reduces profits. That's the real bottom line, not the expectation of truthfulness.

(By the way, that is not a slam against capitalism but against our greedy fallen nature which was greedy and fallen long before the rise of capitalism. Capitalism is no more the source of greed than socialism is the source of envy.)

Here is a recent instance of Obama's mendacity.

Obama is a master of mendacity in the multiplicity of its modes. There is, for example, bullshitting, which is not the same as lying. Obama as Bullshitter explains, with a little help from Professor Harry Frankfurt.

There is also the phenomenon of Orwellian Bullshit.

Pelosi's Orwellian Mendacity: A STFU Moment documents, wait for it, Nancy Pelosi's Orwellian mendacity.

Assuming the Worst

An outstanding piece by William Kilpatrick. Read it!

Je Suis Charlie?

In reaction to the murderous attack by Muslim terrorists on Charbonnier and Co. at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, many have jumped on the "I am Charlie" bandwagon. It is quite understandable. But perhaps a little thought should be given to the question whether one ought to endorse a political pornographer who publishes stuff like the following. Might there be something called toleration extremism? Might it be that while one has a legal right to publish almost anything, one has a moral obligation to exercise restraint? Why do we value freedom of speech? Is it valuable as an end in itself or only as a means to valuable ends? Is it reasonable to maintain that any and all public self-expression is a good just in virtue of its being self-expression? I hope to say something about these questions in the next few days. Meanwhile, please think a bit before trumpeting your identity or rather solidarity with 'Charlie.'

My point in posting the following, needless to say, is not to mock the Christian Trinity but to raise in a graphic manner some very serious questions that require careful thought.