Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Surely one of the idiocies of the age is the oft-repeated, "Diversity is our strength." Anyone who repeats this bit of thoughtless group-speak wears his folly like a scarlet letter. I'll leave it to the reader to work out why the falsehood is false and how it illustrates the fallacy of false abstraction. Why do I have to do all the work?
But a soupçon of sanity is beginning to glimmer in the heads of some of the original progenitors of DEI nonsense. See here.
This morning at The New Yorker:
At this point, we know everything there is to know about Donald Trump. His diehard admirers—not all seventy-four million people who voted for him in the 2020 election but his immovable base, maybe thirty per cent of Republicans—admire him still, now more than ever. Is he a racist? Sure, by many definitions.
At this point I stopped reading. I cannot think of one reasonable definition of 'racist' according to which Trump would count as a racist. Can you? At least the journo* gives some evidence of understanding that the question whether so-an-so is an X depends on the definition of 'X.'
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*'Journo' is my term of disapprobation for hack journalists a crapload of whom can be found among the 'woke.'
I sometimes refer to the current pope as Bergoglio the Termite to underscore the destructive effect he is having on a once-great institution. Early this morning it occurred to me that I might write a post comparing the various termites undermining our institutions. Of course 'President' Joe Biden immediately came to mind. Just now, an e-mail crossed the transom pointing me to an article in which William Kilpatrick, whom I have often approvingly quoted, does part of the job for me, comparing the termitic attributes of Bergoglio and Biden. I recommend it for your perusal.
Needless to say, when I refer to Bergoglio as a termite, that is a figurative use of language: I am not suggesting that he is literally an insect or ought to be 'rubbed out' by chemical or other means. People who cannot distinguish between the literal and the figurative show a lack of intelligence. Most recently, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC and others of his scrofulous ilk have shown this lack of intelligence when they failed to grasp that Donald Trump's recent use of 'bloodbath' was figurative, not literal.*
Joey B struggles with the distinction as well. Remember his “The American people literally stood on the brink of a new Depression”? That was around 2013 if memory serves.
It is worth noting that not every term of abuse is purely abusive: 'termite' as applied to Jorge and Joseph (both of whose initials are 'J. B.') is not purely abusive in that it contains a factual core: both of these clowns are in fact working to destroy their respective institutions. Wittingly or unwittingly? I am inclined to say wittingly in the case of Bergoglio, unwittingly in the case of the demented Biden.
There is of course a serious moral question connected to the use of abusive language meant to express contempt for fellow human beings. But in a war against such anti-civilizational forces as we now face, different rules of engagement are permissible. Or so it seems. A hard nut to crack.
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*You could of course respond to me that Scarborough and Co. understand the literal-figurative distinction and also understand that context is crucial in the interpretation of anyone's oral or written remark. They probably do. But then it is even worse for them: they are trying to bamboozle the American people. This is a moral defect, which is worse than a failure of understanding. Dripping with intellectual dishonesty and disregard for truth, these people warrant our contempt
Outdoing themselves in hyper-ventilatory TDS-fueled rage, Joe Scarborough and the rest of the mendacious insanos at MSDNC (aka MSNBC) and at other lamestream media outlets have seized upon Trump's bloodbath remark as if to illustrate Ayn Rand's point about context-dropping. Although I am no fan of Rand or her acolyte Peikoff as you can readily discern from my Rand category, this term from her lexicon does earn a non-plenary MavPhil endorsement.
Context matters!
That's true. No person is illegal. But who ever said that any person was?
'Woke' knuckleheads of the sort who recently criticized Joey B's SOTU reference to Lincoln Laken Riley's murderer as 'an illegal' regularly give something like the following lame argument:
1) No person is illegal.
2) If any person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien,' then some persons are illegal.
Therefore
3) No person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien.'
Therefore
4) The expression 'illegal alien' and such related expressions as 'illegal immigrant' must be banned.
There is no need to concern ourselves with the inferential move from (3) to (4). The argument is unsound because (2) is plainly false.
To see that it is false you have to be able to distinguish between agent and action, between doer and deed. 'Illegals' are so-called because of their illegal action, namely their illegal entry into the country, and not because they themselves, as agents, are illegal.
Of course, an appeal to sweet reason will get you nowhere with a leftist; what they understand is the hard fist of unreason.
As I have said many times, it is unreasonable to expect that all disputes can be settled reasonably.
And yet we have to have reasons at the ready for the reasonable.
That is why I wrote the above. Besides, I'm a natural-born scribbler who just loves to write, and loves to read what he has written. The life of the mind is its own reward.
They mean woke globalist plutocracy, or something in the semantic vicinity thereof. This is why the enemies of the people see nothing contradictory in using 'lawfare' to keep Donald Trump off the ballot. We the people, however, understand 'democracy' to mean rule by the people. On this understanding of the word, it makes no logical sense to attempt to defend democracy anti-democratically, that is, by silencing the vox populi.
The Orange Man, however, gets the last laugh since SCOTUS has spoken, 9-0. Even Justice Jackson went along, she who doesn't know what a woman is. Has she grown a pair?
The THC level of the stuff smoked in Colorado these days is much higher than that of the weed smoked back in those fabulous and far-off '60s. And the Coloradans, unlike Bill Clinton, inhale. The Rocky Mountain high is now 'plutocratically' high. Are the higher THC levels a causal factor, along with high altitude, in the etiology of Coloradan chucklephuckery?
Is that a rhetorical question or am I really asking? And what about the immediately preceding question? Rhetorical, or am I really asking?
Hot damn, if I didn't enjoy writing the above! The joy of blog. Seriously, though, mockery and derision are among the weapons we must deploy against our political enemies.
Example du jour: 'Gun Buy Back'
Top o' the Stack.
He most certainly is if 'democracy,' as per the woke Orwellian switcheroo — to give it a name — refers to plutocracy, rule by the wealthy. The plutocratic elites of the present time, unlike those of yesteryear, are woke open-borders globalists with no commitment to their countries of origin. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are good examples. You will recall Hillary's endless mouthing of 'our democracy,' not that it has stopped. The superannuated and hyper-mendacious cow has been put out to pasture, thanks to DJT, but the attention-obsessed greed head won't stay there.
That the USA is a plutocracy is convincingly argued by Peter Turchin in End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin, 2023). When Turchin, no conservative, tells us that the USA is a plutocracy, he means that ". . . at the top of the power pyramid in America is the corporate community: the owners and managers of large income-producing assets . . . ." (124-5) The economic elites rule America indirectly by dominating the political class by lobbying and the like. (125) "The two power networks, economic and administrative, are jointed at the hip" with the economic network in the dominant position. (125) "The corporate community also controls the ideological basis of power through the ownership of mass media corporations . . . ." (125)
In nuce: Hillary is homo mendax, and not just her: we do not have a democracy, but a plutocracy, and Trump, billionaire that he is, is a threat to it in his role as populist.
Wokery is the most extreme form of leftism. Some if not all elements of wokery are indicative of mental illness on the part of those who actually believe them. I will mention just four.
. . . how long until mere disagreement with the ruling class and their regime is deemed insurrection?
I know what conservatives such as Sean Hannity mean when they employ the above expression, but the expression is inept. There cannot be two tiers of justice, one for the rulers and the other for the ruled, or one for Democrats and the other for Republicans, for the simple reason that justice in Anglo-American law is equal justice, one justice for all. A guiding principle of our republic, as the Pledge of Allegiance attests, is "liberty and justice for all." We are all (to be considered to be) equal before the law. Whether you are Joe Biden or Joe Blow, you are subject to the same laws. And the same goes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It is a guiding ideal essential to our system of government. That it is being egregiously violated in the case of Trump does not make it any less of an ideal.
Joe Sixpack will say, "This is all just semantics." That is the sort of response one expects from a barfly at Joe's Bar and Grill. Someone who says that has not grasped the truth I have been hammering on for the last twenty years: Language Matters!
Julian Epstein, Democrat, on Crooked Joe. (HT: Tony Flood) There is hope for some Dems.
"Not Right. Not Left. Forward."
There are are real differences between Right and Left that cannot be ignored. The positions must be carefully defined and appropriately labeled. 'No labels' is itself a label, an inept one. Label we must. We ought to do it carefully and thoughtfully.
The world is a plural world shot through with distinctions and differences and diversities. Aren't lefties big on 'diversity?' Diversity cannot be denied. But neither can unity. Both are undeniable, both are valuable, and both, in their dialectical interplay, are world-constitutive. Since they go to a destructive and undialectical extreme that violates my syn- and pan-opticism I label lefties 'diversity mongers.'
May no peace be upon them.
There are, I think, three chief obstacles that stand between Biden and re-election: the public’s perception of the economy, the public’s perception of immigration, and Biden’s own weaknesses as an advocate for his policies and his presidency. [Emphases added.]
This is the sort of garbage one expects from a delusional leftist who thinks that Trump poses an Hitlerian threat to 'democracy.' Blind to their own reality denial, such people think that everything is a matter of perception, messaging, advocacy. So it it is not Biden's disastrous policies that are the problem, but his failure to persuade the ovine masses to go along with them.
How stupid can these stupidi be?
A big Stack attack on language abuse and wokeassery.
The importance of language and the injustice of 'equity.'
Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity.
William of Ockham: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
William of Alhambra: Inimici non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Enemies are worse than friends are good. The enmity of the enemy is more to be feared than the friendship of the friend is to be desired. But show me a man with no enemies, and I'll show you a man with no character. We of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable are distinguished by our enemies, in two senses of 'distinguish': we are set apart from them and we are set above them. A man is judged by the nature of his enemies — and by the nature of his friends.