Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Political Morality

  • Are We the Government?

    "We the people are the government." (Joe Biden) Barack Obama used to spout that same falsehood. "The government is us."   It is a nice question whether they were lying or bullshitting.  The liar cares enough about the truth to want to hide it from us. The bullshitter doesn't care about the truth and will…

  • Bad Doctrines Make Bad People

    The leftism of the leftist is seriously contributory to the appalling behavior of those leftists who, had they not been doctrinally malformed and misdirected, would have been more human in their faults and less diabolical. The same holds for the fascism of the fascist and the National Socialism of the Nazi. A further and more…

  • Malcolm Pollack on ‘Mass Formation’

    Our old friend Malcolm Pollack has an article in American Greatness entitled "'Mass Formation' is a Two-Headed Coin." Pollack offers the following characterization of mass formation: “Mass formation” . . . is a newish term for an age-old and long-studied phenomenon: the occasional, and usually quite sudden, arising of passionate and sometimes completely irrational fixations…

  • Was Kyle Rittenhouse a Vigilante?

    I have been known to refer to David French as a useful idiot in the sense usually attributed to V. I. Lenin, but I won't repeat that legitimate charge here. I'll just say that French is exasperating in the Trump-hating pseudo-conservative style of David Brooks, George F. Will, Bill Kristol, Mona Charen and the rest…

  • The Trial of Kyle

    The Rittenhouse trial was not about the 17-year-old primarily, but about one's right to defend oneself with lethal force against a lethal threat. Hence the great significance of this case. An absolutely crucial moral and legal principle is at stake. The righteous Right won this time, but the fact that the pernicious Left tried to…

  • ‘Equity’ is Unjust

    'Equity' in 'wokespeak' is a deliberately obfuscatory term for equality of outcome. There is no 'equity' in the natural order of things. So it must be enforced from above. Such enforcement, of course, is unjust. I will leave you to work out the details for yourself. Why do I have to do all the work?

  • Liberals Need to Preach What They Practice

    Substack latest. Against the racism of reduced expectations.

  • Dreher contra Buchanan on “All men are created equal.”

    Rod Dreher quotes Patrick J. Buchanan: “All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope? Dreher responds: With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of…

  • Weakness is No Justification: The Converse Callicles Principle

    It needs to be said again at this time when Israel is under attack again due in no small measure to President Biden's weakness and senility. First posted 24 July 2014. ……………………… Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I…

  • Kierkegaard on the Power and the Powerlessness of Earthly Power

    The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight: . . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie) My permitting you to do X does not…

  • Morally Culpable Political Ignorance

    Is there such a thing? Is Sanders the Socialist morally culpable for being wrong? Or is he merely wrong? Perhaps he is neither. Perhaps he is mad. The mad do the same thing over and over again in the hope that next time it will be different.

  • David French, Donald Trump, Christianity, and Politics

    David French maintains that Christians cannot, if they are to remain true to Christian teachings, support Donald Trump: The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject . . . but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny…

  • A Field Day for Authoritarians

    Another example: In Colorado, a man was playing with his six-year-old daughter in a park with no one else within a vast distance, when he was arrested by a group of police officers–wrongly, based on signs at the park–who themselves failed to follow guidelines as to use of masks, gloves, and social distancing. It makes…

  • Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America

    Excerpts: Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary…

  • Biden’s (Lack Of) Cognitive Fitness: Dems Pull a 180.

    An outstanding article by Glenn Greenwald. But, as the Democratic establishment has united with creepy speed and obedience behind Biden in order to stop the Sanders candidacy, those who now raise these concerns instantly come under a withering assault of insults and attacks from Democratic Party operatives along with their crucial media allies: thinly disguised pro-Biden…