Decline of the West – Page 17 – Maverick Philosopher

Texting Their Lives Away?

I am currently reading, among other things, Kevin Mitnick, The Art of Invisibility, Little, Brown & Co., 2017. A treatise on cyber-security, it strikes me as slightly alarmist, but Steve Wozniak recommends it. I don't have to tell you who he is. The following, however, caught my eye and pricked my philosopher's skepticism:

A recent study found that 87 percent of teenagers text daily, compared to the 61 percent who say they use Facebook, the next most popular choice. Girls send, on average, about 3,952 text messages per month, and boys send closer to 2,815 text messages per month, according to the study. (pp. 72-73)

Could this be right? If you divide 31 into 3,952 you get 127.48. So is the average girl sending that many text messages per day? I don't believe it.

Mitnick in a foonote sends us to this Pew Research page where we read something rather more plausible:

The number of text messages sent or received by cell phone owning teens ages 13 to 17 (directly through phone or on apps on the phone) on a typical day is 30.⁵ The number of messages exchanged for girls is higher, typically sending and receiving 40 messages a day. And for the oldest girls (15 to 17), this rises to a median of 50 messages exchanged daily.

And notice that the Pew figure is for messages sent and received, while Mitnick speaks only about messages sent.

So how much credibility does Mitnick have? This little spot check of mine suggests that he slapped his book together rather quickly. But there is plenty to be learned from it.

We all need to slow down, unplug, and look at things.

One of my aphorisms gives good advice:

How to Look at Things

Look at them as if for the first time — and the last.

A Broad Coalition of the Sane

In a comment thread I wrote,

We need a broad coalition of the sane which would include many libertarians, the few liberals who haven't lost their minds, and most conservatives, with each subgroup tempering its own tendency toward extremism.

Malcolm Pollack responded:

I used to hope for this, and believe it was possible, but now, to my sorrow, I just can't see how it is ever going to happen. With every passing day, and every tick of the demographic clock, we move faster and faster in the opposite direction, and I can see in America today nothing even remotely resembling a coherent political opposition on the Right. As I wrote in my letter to you, I think we have slipped past the 'event horizon', and all future timelines now must pass through the singularity. What form that will take, and what will come after, I can barely imagine — but I don't think it will be pleasant for anyone.

This was before the election of Trump. I wonder if Mr. Pollack is a bit more optimistic now.

Multi-Racial but not Multi-Cultural

The USA cannot help but be a multi-racial society, but if we cannot agree on a common culture for public purposes with English as its official language and the values of the founding documents as its foundation, then the end is in sight. But collapse takes time and those of us in our mid-60s, assuming we don't live too long, should be able to weather the storm without too much stress.

Unfortunately, we no longer have the collective will to demand the assimilation without which immigration is a recipe for Balkanization. Any sane person should be able to see that the values of Sharia are incompatible with American values, and that no Muslims should be allowed to immigrate who are unwilling to accept and honor our values.

But it may already be too late since we don't even have the 'logically prior' collective will to put a stop to illegal immigration and the flouting of Federal immigration law by so-called 'sanctuary' cities and other jurisdictions. First stop illegal immigration, then worry about assimilation in connection with legal immigration.

Once more: improper entry into the country is already a violation of the criminal code. When the mayor of a great city, New York, refuses to deport illegal aliens who commit such serious felonies as driving while intoxicated, then you know that there is precious little common ground left.

We cannot agree on this? Then what can we agree on?

We conservatives can blame ourselves to some extent. We lost ourselves in our private lives while the destructive Left had its way.

Paradoxically, our appreciation that the political is a limited sphere has left us at a disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere.

The Main Internal Threat: The Left

If radical Islam is the main external threat to the republic, the main internal threat is the contemporary Left. Excerpts from Ben Stein:

The nation’s universities have become no-go zones for people who do not hew to the one-party, anti-American, anti-police, anti-business attitudes of the violent brownshirts. Quiet, scholarly geniuses like Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald — who dare to suggest that Americans should work for a living, who speak out in defense of the police — are shouted down, shoved, sometimes assaulted, and chased from campuses under guard. Ann Coulter — a long-time friend, staggeringly intelligent and amusing — is not permitted to speak at a University of California, Berkeley, campus, because she makes such witty, shining defenses of our great nation. This is a taxpayer-funded campus.

There’s an atmosphere of terror on campuses across the country. My beloved law school alma mater, mighty Yale, shamed itself recently by blackballing faculty who wanted to keep a sense of humor on the campus.

The formula is simple. Get a few nonwhite students to label a potential speaker a racist, whether or not there is the slightest evidence he or she is. Then bring in the looney left faculty, then bring in the women with fake charges of sexism, and soon you have a mighty avalanche against the speaker. The fascists call themselves anti-fascists, of course. But anyone with eyes and ears can see and hear who’s burning the books.

As far as I know, neither Hitler nor the Japanese ever planned to invade America. Certainly Vietnam didn’t. North Korea is a menace, but a poverty-stricken nation of 22 million is not going to subjugate us and take away our freedom.

They don’t have to. We’ve done it to ourselves on our campuses. Via our imbecile young people and their pawns and masters in the faculties, we have incinerated the First Amendment. We’ve made sure that our young learn only lies and subversive propaganda against America. Hitler had his storm troopers to silence the opposition. We have Black Lives Matter, which aims to emasculate the main force guarding black lives — the police — and which is always in the vanguard at closing down free speech. It’s a catastrophe for this country. It’s not what our young men and their parents fought for, died for, and wept for in The War. Look quick. We’re losing this war for freedom — and fast.

Is the Benedict Option the Answer to Neo-Barbarianism?

Read it.

Responses to Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option

A tip of the hat to Karl White for sending us to Nine Most Intelligent Takes on Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option. I haven't yet read the book, though it ought to be arriving today. (What sort of 'ought' is that?)

Nor have I read the above-linked responses. So I don't know whether they are the most intelligent or if they are all, or even any of them, intelligent. You decide.

Keep Calm and Ostrichize On

George Neumayr's piece begins:

In 2006, Melanie Phillips wrote a book called Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within. She argued that Britain was a sitting duck for Islamic terrorists, owing to its idiotic embrace of political correctness, multiculturalism, and religious relativism.

And ends:

Keep calm and propagandize on — that’s the attitude in Sadiq Khan’s London, where terrorism, as he put it last year, some months after his election as mayor, is “part and parcel of living in a big city.”

Khan's attitude is defeatist. Was terrorism "part and parcel of living in a big city" twenty years ago? There are plenty of stateside defeatists too, and some call themselves 'conservative.' But we got lucky last November and the deplorable Hillary went down in defeat, and with her the then-regnant mentality of Barack Hussein Obama.

It may be too late for the UK and Europe. But it is not too late for us.

The New Monastics of the Mind

My man Hanson with another fascinating column. Excerpts:

Monasteries of the mind are an effort to reconnect with the past and disengage psychologically from the present. For millions of Americans, their music, their movies, their sports, and their media are not current fare. Instead, they have mentally moved to mountaintops or inaccessible valleys, where they can live in the past or dream of the future, but certainly not dwell in the here and now.

Count me in. (I have also been known to hole up physically in inaccessible valleys for weeks at a time.) But why? Several reasons, one of them being the lamestream media:

Monastics are tuning out the media. Listening to Brian Williams warn of fake news would be like paying attention to Miley Cyrus’s reminder about the need for abstinence. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is often said to be the ethical conscience of the paper’s op-ed page, recently begged the IRS to commit a felony by sending him Trump’s tax returns. He went so far as to provide his own address to facilitate the crime: “But if you’re in IRS and have a certain president’s tax return that you’d like to leak, my address is: NYT, 620 Eighth Ave., NY NY 10018.”

Someone belatedly might have gotten the message. Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow got a hold of two pages from Trump’s 2005 tax return. On MSNBC she went the full Roswell-UFO mode in hyping the scoop until she finally grasped that a twelve-year-old-tax return revealed that her Trump-as-Snidely-Whiplash had paid a greater tax (percentage-wise and absolutely) than “you didn’t build that” Barack Obama paid. Such an inadvertent demonstration is not the purpose for which a Rachel Maddow was hired.

If Paul Krugman can win the Nobel prize, and Bill Clinton and Rachel 'Mad Dog' Maddow are Rhodes Scholars, then those awards have become well-nigh meaningless.

Middlebury Shouts Down Charles Murray

Here:

It’s been exactly 40 years since my late wife and I quit as English profs at Middlebury College, where hundreds of screaming students wouldn’t allow Charles Murray, one of the nation’s foremost conservative intellectuals, to speak to them yesterday, as a campus conservative group had invited him to do.

NeverTrumpers and Others Losing their Minds and Morals Over Trump

Victor Davis Hanson:

Former Weekly Standard editor in chief Bill Kristol suggested in a tweet that if he faced a choice (and under what surreal circumstances would that happen?) between the constitutionally, democratically elected president and career government officials’ efforts to thwart or remove him, he would come down on the side of the revolutionary, anti-democratic “deep state”: “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it [emphasis added], prefer the deep state to the Trump state.” No doubt some readers interpreted that as a call to side with anti-constitutional forces against an elected U.S. president.

[. . .]

Fake news proliferates. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Representative Elijah Cummings recently attacked departing national-security advisor Michael Flynn by reading a supposed Flynn tweet that was a pure invention. Nor did Trump, as reported, have a serious plan to mobilize “100,000” National Guard troops to enforce deportations.

Other false stories claimed that Trump had pondered invading Mexico, that his lawyer had gone to Prague to meet with the Russians, and that he had removed from the Oval Office a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. — sure proof of Trump’s racism. Journalists — including even “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post — reposted fake news reports that Trump’s father had run a campaign for the New York mayorship during which he’d aired racist TV ads.

‘Understand’ is a Verb of Success

Here I encountered the following sentence:

However, most people understand their side is good and the opposing side is bad, so it’s much easier for them to form these emotional opinions of political parties.

This sentence features a misuse of 'understand.' 'Understand' is a verb of success. If you understand something, then it is the case. For example, if you understand that both 2 and -2 are square roots of 4, then this is the case. Otherwise there is a failure to understand. 'Understand' in this respect is like 'know' and unlike 'believe' or 'think'. My knowing that p entails that p is true. My believing or thinking that p does not entail that p is true. My understanding that my side is good entails that it is. The above sentence should read as follows:

However, most people THINK their side is good and the opposing side is bad, so it’s much easier for them to form these emotional opinions of political parties.

A second example:

Not necessarily, says Taubes, who suggests that the ad hoc societal test of the low-carb solution lacks certainty. “If you understand beyond a shadow of a doubt that your disease is caused by sugar and flour and refined carbohydrates,” he says, “you are more likely to adhere to a diet that cuts them out.”

Some will say that usage changes, to which I will reply: no doubt, but not all change is change for the better.

Call me a prescriptivist if you like, but don't confuse me with a school-marm prescriptivist. If you end a sentence with a preposition, I won't draw my weapon. For that is a piece of pedantry up with which I shall not put!

On the Value of Twitter as a Research Tool

George Will:

In 2013, a college student assigned to research a deadly substance sought help via Twitter: "I can't find the chemical and physical properties of sarin gas someone please help me." An expert at a security consulting firm tried to be helpful, telling her that sarin is not gas. She replied, "yes the (expletive) it is a gas you ignorant (expletive). sarin is a liquid & can evaporate … shut the (expletive) up."

The Central Dividing Line in American Politics

Here:

[Samuel] Huntington is most famous for arguing in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order that the post-Cold War world would not be defined by the universalization of liberal values but by ethnic frictions within nations and civilizational clashes between them (the most volatile fault lines, he said, were between the West and Islam and the West and China). Even more prescient, at least as far as the United States is concerned, was Huntington’s 2004 book, Who Are We?, which described “nationalism versus cosmopolitanism” as the central dividing line in American politics, with immigration as its focal point.

Huntington identified two forms of cosmopolitanism—neoconservatism, popular on the right, which promised to bring America’s values to the world, and multiculturalism, popular on the left, which promised to bring the world’s values to America—both of which he attacked as destructive and unsustainable. The 2016 election campaign was one long demonstration of how right Huntington was, and how blind were his liberal and neoconservative critics who had no idea of the forces building in American politics.

The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed on benighted and backward peoples riven by tribal hatreds and depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment.

The mistake of the multi-culti cultural Marxists is to imagine that comity is possible without commonality, that wildly diverse sorts of people can live together in peace and harmony. Or at least that is one mistake of the politically correct multi-cultis.

Along comes Trump. Whatever you think of the man and his ostentation, self-absorption, slovenly speech, occasional feel-ups of members of the distaff contingent, and all the rest, he is a powerful vehicle of a necessary correction away from both forms of cosmopolitanism/globalism toward a saner view.

Donald J. Trump, the somewhat unlikely vehicle of a necessary correction. Without course correction the cliff is up ahead to be approached either by Donkey Express (Hillary) or more slowly but just as surely by Elephant (Jeb! and colleagues).

So how does the Left respond? In their usual vile and thoughtless way by the hurling of such epithets as sexist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, fascist . . . you know the litany. According to Chris Mathews of MSNBC, Trump's inaugural speech was "Hitlerian."

The alacrity with which these leftist bums reach for the Hitler comparison shows the poverty of their 'thought.'

Addendum. Tony Bevin writes:

In your post you write:

The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed on benighted and backward peoples riven by tribal hatreds and depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment.

This is of a mind with Milton Friedman's observation about the Euro. He noted that one cannot impose a common currency that is not supported by a common political will [emphasis added by BV]and gave the Euro 10 years before it became extinct.

I think he (and you above) are correct. Friedman may have only been wrong about the timeline. By the way, the Euro, which consistently traded at about $1.33 is now down to the $1.02-$1.05 range and Deutsche Wealth management expects it to be about $0.85 toward the end of this year. With Brexit, Italexit and other countries beginning to discuss the possibility of leaving the EU, is the beginning of the end near? We shall see.

How to Age Disgracefully in Hollywood

Camille Paglia on Madonna Louise Ciconne:

Madonna's opening line at the awards gala was edited out of the shortened official video: "I stand before you as a doormat — oh, I mean a female entertainer." Merciful Minerva! Can there be any woman on Earth less like a doormat than Madonna Louise Ciccone? Madonna sped on with shaky assertions ("There are no rules if you're a boy") and bafflingly portrayed the huge commercial success of her 1992 book, Sex, as a chapter of the Spanish Inquisition, in which she was persecuted as "a whore and a witch."

C.P. is often a good antidote to P. C., not that that I would award Miss Paglia the much-coveted plenary MavPhil endorsement.

Cultural Suicide

Yet another example. (HT: Karl White) "University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white."

The Telegraph title isn't even grammatical. The stupid demand is that these greats BE removed. Has England declined so far that its journalists can no longer write or speak correct English and must take instruction from an American blogger?

Demands refer to future events. I can demand that you leave my house, but I can't demand that you not have entered it, or that you are leaving it. I could of course demand that you continue the process of removing your sorry ass from my premises, but that too is a future-oriented demand.

I demand that you are stopping to be a willfully stupid leftist and that you are removed from my presence!

UPDATE (1/10). Horace Jeffery Hodges comments,

I think the statement is British English:

"University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white."

American English requires a subjunctive form:

I demand that they be removed . . .

This is one of the things I dislike about British grammar.

I don't know. I may be wrong, and Jeff may be right. In any case, it makes no bloody sense to use the present tense to refer to a future event. It is in the nature of a demand that it point us to the future for its satisfaction or the opposite. There is more to grammar than usage; there is also logic broadly construed. But then I am something of a prescriptivist. The distinction between singular and plural, for example, is logical and good grammar respects it.

Correct: A polite chess player thanks his opponent for the game, whether he wins or loses.

Incorrect: A polite chess player thanks their opponent for the game, whether they win or lose.

What about this: A polite chess player thanks her opponent for the game, whether she wins or loses.

I argued years ago that if 'his' can be correctly used gender-neutrally, then so can 'her.' And this despite the fact that in 'standard English usage' (admittedly a tendentious phrase) 'his' but not 'her' can be so used. Lydia McGrew got her knickers in a knot over this, thinking that I had succumbed to political correctness. This goes to show that for some conservatives one can never be too conservative. The least little concession to liberals shows that one has 'sold out.'

But more important than quibbling over language is defeating the Left and the contemptible shitheads who would remove Plato and Kant from the curriculum.

What these cranially-feculent morons fail to grasp is that really to understand their own crack-brained POMO ideology, they would have to study Kant. Kant's defensible constructivism was part of the set-up for their indefensible constructivism. Besides, you need Kant to understand Hegel, and Hegel Marx, and Marx the Frankfurt School . . . .