Category: Uncategorized

Was she hired because of  the 'intersectionality' of her race, sex,  and surname? Story here.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay has apologized for her widely condemned Congressional testimony on campus antisemitism, which she said "failed to convey what is my truth."

Her truth?  My ass!  There is no such thing as her truth, my truth or yours or theirs, multiply your 'pronouns' beyond necessity and sanity as you will. But I have made this point before. Go to my truth category. True and True For  is a representative  post.

Vito sends the following tweet from that indefatigable quill-driver and purveyor of insights, Victor Davis Hanson. I have been following and promoting this guy for many years, and so it is with great pleasure that I see him at the top of his game, with the influence he deserves. Hanson's tweet below the fold.

Continue reading “The President of Harvard and ‘Her Truth’”

"Crimes and Misdemeanors" is Woody Allen's masterpiece. Here is the Seder scene. 

The scene ends with Saul saying "If necessary, I will always choose God over the truth."  It works cinematically, but it is a philosophically lame response to the atheist Aunt May. It is lame because Saul portrays the theist as one who self-deceivingly embraces consolatory fictions despite his knowledge that they are fictions. Saul might have plausibly replied along one or both of the following lines.

1) It cannot be true that there is no God, since without God there is no truth.  The existence of truth presupposes the existence of God. Truth is the state of a mind in contact with reality. No minds, no truth. But there are infinitely many truths, including infinitely many necessary truths. The infinity of truths and the necessity of some them require for their ultimate support and repository an  infinite and necessary mind. "And this all men call God." So if there is no God, then there is no truth, in which case one cannot prefer truth over God in the manner of Aunt May.

Nietzsche understood this very well. He saw that the death of God is the death of truth. He concluded that there is no truth, but only  the competing perspectives of mutually antagonistic power-centers. That way, however, can lead to Hitler.

Now the above is a mere bloggity-blog sketch. Here is a more rigorous treatment. Rigorous though it is, it does not establish the existence of God beyond any possible doubt; it does, however, render the existence of God rationally acceptable which is all that one can reasonably expect in these precincts.

2) Saul might also have challenged Aunt May as follows:

You say that it is true that there is no God, that there is no moral world-order, that might makes right, and so on. You obviously think that it is important that we face up to these truths and stop fooling ourselves.  You obviously think that there is something morally disreputable about cultivating illusions and stuffing the heads of the young with them, that morally one ought not do these things.  But what grounds this moral ought that you plainly think binds all of us and not just you?  Does it just hang in the air, so to speak? And if it does, what makes it binding or morally obligatory? Can you ultimately make sense of objective moral oughts and ought-nots on the naturalistic scheme you seem to be presupposing?  Won't you have to make at least a Platonic ascent in the direction of the Good?  If so, how will you stop the further ascent to the Good as self-existent and thus as  God?

Or look at this way, May. You think it is a value that we face reality, a reality that for you is Godless, even if  facing what you call reality does not contribute to our flourishing but in fact contributes to the opposite.  But how could something be a value for us if it impedes our flourishing? Is it not ingredient in the concept of value that a value to be what it is must be a value for the valuer? So even if it is true that there is no God, no higher destiny for humans, that life is in the end absurd, how could it be a value for us to admit these truths if truths they be?  So what are you getting so worked up over, sister? I have just pulled the rug out from under your moral enthusiasm!

Here

This Substack piece by N. S. Lyons is very long but very good. I invite my top commenters — I won't name names lest I inadvertently omit someone — to weigh  in on it or parts of it. The drift of the piece is announced early on:

. . .when it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but converging to become more alike.

In fact, I can already predict and describe the winner set to prevail in this epochal competition between these two fiercely opposed national systems. In this soon-to-be triumphant system…

Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.

Who can deny that given the events of the last few days?

Deeper in, the following passage caught my attention due to my interest in Carl Schmitt:

Across the West, the managerial elite therefore immediately went into a frenzy over the danger allegedly presented by “populism” and launched their own revolt, declaring a Schmittian state of exception in which all the standard rules and norms of democratic politics could be suspended in order to respond to this existential “crisis.” In fact, some began to question whether democracy itself might have to be suspended in order to save it.

“It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” New York Time Magazine journalist James Traub thundered with an iconic 2016 piece in Foreign Policy magazine. This quickly became a view openly and proudly embraced among the managerial elite, who no longer hesitated to express their frustration with democracy and its voters. (“Did I say ‘ignorant’? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them,” Traub declared.) “Too Much Democracy is Killing Democracy,” is how a 2019 article published by neocon rag The Bulwark put it, arguing for Western nations to take their “bitter technocratic medicine” and establish “a political, social, and cultural compact that makes participation by many unnecessary.”

My posts on Carl Schmitt are collected here. Most relevant is perhaps A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt. (Written 17 February 2019)

Here

Filed under: Academentia, Wokery.

If hell is separation from God, why wouldn't a body held in thrall by sensuous pleasure do as well as a body wracked with pain?  Absorbed in sensuous pleasure, one is arguably farther from God than when in pain.

Substack latest. More on David Horowitz.

The following incomplete draft has been languishing on my hard drive, on a memory stick, and in 'the cloud' since late November 202o.  So I will post it now to see what comments Elliot C. (and anyone else) has to offer. In other threads he has shown a burning interest in this question.

………………………..

1) I see a tree, a palo verde.  Conditions are normal both inside and outside of me, the perceiver. My eyesight is 20/20, the lighting is good, etc. I see that the tree is green, blooming, swaying slightly in the breeze, and so on. I know (directly, i.e., in the temporal present, without reliance on memory or testimony or inference) that the tree has these and other properties, and I know this by sense perception, in this instance by seeing them, and indeed by seeing them without the aid of such instruments as binoculars or closed-circuit television.  I know that the tree is green by seeing that the tree is green.  But  I cannot see that the tree is green without seeing green at the tree.  So I know (directly) that the tree is green by seeing green at the tree. It follows that the property green is sense-perceivable. It is a sensible or observable property. 

2) I presumably also know that the tree exists by seeing it.  That is, my seeing the tree suffices for my knowing that it exists. And the birds in the branches? Likewise: I know that they exist by seeing them.  But while I cannot know (directly) that the tree is green without seeing green at the tree, I can presumably know that the tree exists without seeing existence at the tree. For whatever existence is, it is not a sensible or observable property.  I see the green of the tree, but not the existence of the tree. Green is observable; existence is not. If I do know that the tree exists by seeing it, how do I know this given that existence is not  a sensible or empirically observable property or feature of the thing that exists?

3) And so we have a puzzle that arises naturally just by reflecting on some obvious data.  The problem is expressible as an inconsistent pentad. The  following propositions are individually plausible, and yet they are collectively inconsistent. Something's got to give.  To solve the problem, we either reject or reformulate one or more of the propositions, or we argue that, despite appearances, the propositions are consistent.

a) I know that the tree exists.

b) I know that the tree exists by seeing  that it exists.

c) An individual exists by instantiating the property of existence.

d) If I see that a thing has a property, then I see the property at the thing.

e) One cannot see or otherwise sense-perceive the property of existence.

The five  propositions are (collectively) inconsistent. Any four of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of the first four entails the negation of (e).  So the only way to solve the problem is by rejecting/revising one or more of the limbs. But which one?  Given the high plausibility of (a), (b), and (e), the natural candidates for rejection are (c) and (d).

Response 1: The existence of an individual is  not a property it instantiates, but the individual itself.

Given that the pentad is inconsistent, one response to it is by rejecting (c) by rejecting a presupposition on which (c) rests, namely, that  existence is a property of individuals.  Suppose it is maintained instead that the existence of an individual is just that individual.  Thus the existence of the tree is just the tree; it is not a property of the tree. If so,  then there is no real, non-verbal, difference between the tree and its existence. A tree and an existent/existing tree are one and the same.  To see the tree would be to see its existence.  Equivalently, to see the tree would be to see an existing tree. If this is right, then the solution to the puzzle is straightforward: I know that the tree is green by seeing  green at the tree, and I know that the tree exists simply by seeing the tree.  Seeing a sense-perceptible thing suffices for knowing that it exists.  

Rebuttal of Response 1

To see what is wrong with this response, consider a different example. I am looking at the Sun. While I am looking at it, it ceases to exist. Since it takes about eight minutes for the light of the Sun to reach the Earth, the following could happen: the object-directedness of the perceptual act undergoes no modification despite the fact that the object, the Sun, has ceased to exist.  I continue for a few minutes to see something  — no seeing without seeing something — but the something I see no longer exists. This shows that one cannot infer the real or extra-mental existence of the accusative of an act from the accusative's givenness.  By the accusative of a mental act I mean that which appears to the mind in  the act. In my first example, the accusative is the tree precisely as seen.  The back side of the tree is not seen by me, and so it is not part of the accusative. And the same goes for the ant on the front side of the tree which I cannot see because of my distance from the tree. Of course, the tree in reality either has an ant on its front side or it does not.  The tree in reality cannot be indeterminate in this regard, or in any regard.  But the accusative, as such, is indeterminate in this regard. This is the fate of intentional objects generally qua intentional objects: they are incomplete. This incompleteness reflects the finitude of our minds.

In the second example the accusative is the Sun precisely  as seen by me here and now. Therefore, if by 'existence' we mean existence in reality or existence in itself or extra-mental existence — these being equivalent terms — then I cannot know that a perceptible thing exists simply by seeing it.  For it could be that the accusative does not exist at the time it appears. I see the Sun at a time when there is no Sun to be seen. Appearing and being (existing) fall asunder.

One can arrive at the same conclusion via the Cartesian dream argument. I see things in dreams  that don't exist or that no longer exist.  My use of 'see' here is obviously a phenomenological use.  On this use, 'see' is not a verb of success: 'S sees x' does not entail 'S exists.'  Phenomenologically, one can see and otherwise sense-perceive what does not exist. I  had an extremely  vivid lucid dream once in which I saw, heard, and touched a beloved cat that I knew was dead.  I SAW the cat (in the phenomenological sense of 'see') despite its nonexistence in reality.  I didn't remember the cat or imagine it:  I saw it. I had a visual experience as of a cat even though my eyes were closed.

Or suppose a mad neuroscientist so stimulates a brain in a vat that the brain gives rise to a visual perception as of a tree just like the one in my opening example.  (The brain is eyeless and is not connected to any optical transducers.) The accusative of the act is given but it does not exist in reality.  You could say that in a case like this the accusative enjoys esse intentionale but not esse reale.

The upshot is that one cannot know that a perceptible item such as tree exists by seeing it. So response 1 fails.

Response 2: One can know that a visually-perceptible thing exists without seeing that the thing instantiates the putative property of existence and without seeing a thing that is identical to its existence.  The existence of an individual does not belong to the individual.  

On this response, a presupposition of all five limbs of the pentad is called into question, namely, the notion that existence belongs to existing things as it would belong to them if it were either a property of them, or identical to them, or hidden within them, or in some other way 'at' them or 'in' them.  One way to deny this presupposition is by holding that the existence of a tree, say, is really a property of something else.  One might say that the existence of trees is a property of the world-whole, the property of containing trees.  To say that trees exist would then be to say that the world contains trees.  Existence would then be a mondial attribute: it would be a property of the world.  The existence of Fs is then just the world's having the property of containing Fs.   The existence of Socrates is just the world's containing Socrates.

Rebuttal of Response 2

The theory is explanatorily  circular and worthless for that reason. The world cannot contain Socrates unless Socrates exists.  Before (logically speaking) the world can contain Socrates, Socrates must exist. To explain the existence of Socrates by saying that the world has him as a member is to presuppose the very thing that needs explaining, namely, the existence of Socrates.  The circular is of embarrassingly short diameter.

Reach for a supernatural explanation only after having exhausted naturalistic ones. That's a maxim of mine.  But there are so many outrages being perpetrated these days by so many people who ought to know better, people in high places, that I am sorely tempted to suspect something diabolical at work. And I am not the only one given to this suspicion.

Here is an example. "An Italian monastery worth millions is another in a succession of religious houses being shut down by the Vatican for questionable reasons." You decide what's going on here.

If you want to secularize and thereby destroy Christianity, an otherworldly religion if ever there was one, then you are well-advised to demolish the monasteries, not all at once, but slowly, one by one, so as not to call attention to your Satanic mischief. An incremental approach to the excremental, to put it scatologically.

Kierkegaard (1813-1855) rightly described Christianity as "heterogeneity to the world." Monasticism is one form this heterogeneity takes. I must immediately point out, however, that S. K. was himself anti-monastic.  I have a post on this which I need to find, revise, re-think, and upload to Substack.

While you are at Crisis Magazine, please read the pithy A Brief History of Our Annihilation. I could quibble with some of the points, but the basic drift, I fear, is correct. And the drift is downward, into the Pit.

Along the same dark downward trajectory, Satanic Grammy Awards . . . Brought to you by Pfizer.

I did not watch the Grammies because of my personal 'no pollution' policy: do not allow toxins into your body or into your mind/heart except in such limited quantities as are harmless or necessary to stay informed of such developments it would be imprudent to remain ignorant of.

Finally, The Return of the Anti-Christ. You will know him by his lies, descended as he is from the Father of Lies.  No, not Joey B, or Alejandro Mayorkas, or or Al Gore of the "boiling oceans" climate prophecy delivered to the faithful in Davos.  You know who I am talking about.

But as I said at the outset, we invoke the supernatural only after we have exhausted naturalistic explanantia. So, secularists, what explains these developments?

A mixed bag for your enjoyment, but mainly mine.  I post what I like and I like what I post. And I post what I've posted before. Links go bad, and even when they don't I never get tired of the old tunes I like. It's Saturday night, friends, pour yourself a stiff one and relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow.  I am drinking the fermented juice of the agave cactus mixed with the Italian aperitivo, Aperol. Straight up, in a generous shot glass, three parts of Hornitos to one part Aperol. This combo is a synaptic lubricant nonpareil.  Schmeckt gut! What's your libation? Forget for a time the swine who have taken over our great country, and enjoy the moment.

Thelonious Monk, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You

Wes Montgomery, 'Round Midnight

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away. In 7/4 time.

Ry Cooder, I Think It's Going to to Work Out Fine

Jeff Beck, Sleepwalk. The old Santo and Johnny instrumental from 1959.

Danny Gatton, master of the Telecaster. Phenomenally good, practically unknown.

Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound. When your name is 'Bob Dylan' you have your pick of sidemen. A great band. "The walls of pride, they're high and they're wide. You can't see over, to the other side."

Joe Brown, Sea of  Heartbreak.  Nothing touches Don Gibson's original effort, but Brown's is a very satisfying version.

Elvis Presley, Little Sister 

Carole King, You've Got a Friend

Buddy Guy, et al., Sweet Home Chicago. Looks like everyone is playing a Strat except for Johnny Winter.

Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go.  A fine, if quirky, cover of the old George Reeves hit from 1959.

Marty Robbins, El Paso. Great guitar work.

 One of the points I made earlier was that presentism as a non-tautological, substantive thesis in the philosophy of time cannot be formulated without the notion of existence simpliciter. I then asked David Brightly whether he accepted the notion. Here is his reply:

Do I accept the notion of existence simpliciter? Yes and No. In so far as 'X exists simpliciter' appears to be a shorthand (a computer scientist's macro) for the disjunction of tensed claims 'X existed or X exists or X will exist' then I can guardedly accept it. This does seem to capture what is meant by 'listed in the final ontological inventory', does it not? But I worry that if we aren't very careful it can lead to logical mistakes. 'Simpliciter' here is a strange beast. It isn't an adverb qualifying 'to exist' for that would make 'to exist simpliciter' into a tenseless verb, and there are no such things. Nor, I think, does 'exists simpliciter' attribute a property to an item, so I cannot see 'existence simpliciter' as a concept. There is a whiff of 'grue' about it.

The presentist faces a problem of formulation. He tells us that only what exists at present exists. The problem is to say what the second occurrence of 'exists' in the italicized sentence expresses or denotes. What are the combinatorially possible views?

A. The second occurrence is present-tensed. This reading yields tautological presentism which is of no philosophical interest.  Note that if presentism is a tautological thesis, then 'eternalism,' according to which past, present, and future items are all equally real/existent, is self-contradictory.  If the only viable presentism is tautological presentism, then the dispute between presentists about what exists and eternalists about what exists is of no philosophical interest and is a pseudo-dispute.  This 'possibility' cannot be dismissed out of hand. I suspect that David may be luring us in this direction.  We should also be clear that presentism about what exists is not the same as presentism about existence. This is a distinction the explanation of which must wait.

B. The second occurrence expresses what I will call disjunctively omnitemporal existence: the (putative) property a temporal item has if it either existed, or exists, or will exist, where each disjunct is tensed.  On this approach, the presentist thesis amounts to this:

Everything in time that either existed, or exists, or will exist, exists (present tense).

But this is manifestly false. Kepler existed but does not exist (present tense).  I would also add, alluding to David's 'grue' remark, that while there are disjunctive predicates, it does not follow that there are disjunctive properties.  Existence simpliciter cannot be a disjunctive property any more than being either anorexic or underinflated is a property. 'Either anorexic or underinflated' is true of some basketballs, but surely, or at least arguably, the predicate picks out no property.  Likewise, 'existed or exists or will exist' picks out no property even on the assumption that existence is a first-level property. 

C. There is also conjunctively omnitemporal existence: the (putative) property a temporal item has if it existed, and exists, and will exist, where each conjunct is tensed.  The everlasting (as opposed to eternal) God is both disjunctively and conjunctively omnitemporal.  To save bytes, I will leave it to the reader to work out why this suggestion won't help us with our problem.

D. The second occurrence of 'exists' expresses timeless existence.  This obviously won't work because Only what exists at present exists cannot mean that only what exists at present exists timelessly.  For anything that exists at present exists in time and is therefore precisely not timeless.  So the existence simpliciter of temporal beings cannot be timeless existence. Yet it must somehow be tenseless.   Indeed, it it would seem to have to be irreducibly tenseless, where a definition of tenselessness is irreducibly tenseless just in case the definiens contains no tensed expressions. But then the problem becomes nasty indeed: how can temporal items, items in time, items subject to intrinsic change, both substantial and accidental, exist tenselessly?

At this point we need to note, contrary to David's claim that there are no tenseless verbs, that there are tenseless uses of 'exists' and tenseless uses of the copulative and identitarian 'is.' That the number 7 exists, if true, is tenselessly true. That the number 7 is prime is also tenselessly true. If I tell you that 7 is a prime number, it would be a lame joke were you to reply, "You mean now?" The same goes for the proposition that 7 is 5 + 2. If you object that these truths are not tenselessly, but omnitemporally, true I will say that they are true in all worlds including those possible worlds in which there is no time, and are therefore atemporally true, and thus tenselessly true.

And similarly for the eternal as opposed to everlasting God. If God is outside of time, then all truths about him are timelessly tenseless.

The above examples assume that there are atemporal items, items outside of time.  I expect David to balk.  If he denies that there are atemporal items, I will have him consider the case in which I say to my class, "Hume is an empiricist." A smartass might object, "Hume cannot be an empiricist because he no longer exists." I would then explain that to say that Hume is an empiricist is to use 'is' tenselessly.  Similarly if  I report that for Hume all significant ideas derive from sensory impressions.  'Derive' here functions tenselessly. Same with 'are' in 'Cats are animals.'  The same goes for extinct species of critter. In 'Dinosaurs are animals,' 'are' functions tenselessly. Ditto for 'Unicorns are animals.'

So now I ask David: have I convinced you that there are tenseless uses of verbs in ordinary English?

E. Could we say that the second occurrence of 'exists' in Only what exists at present exists expresses the quantifier sense of 'exists'? In the quantifier sense, x exists =_df for some y, x = y. We would then be saying that 

Only an item that exists at present is such that something is that item

which is equivalent to

Only an item that exists at present is identical to something

which is equivalent to

Whatever is identical to something exists at present.

Socrates, however, is identical to something, namely himself, but he does not exist at present.  The trouble with the existence expressed by the existential quantifier is that it is general, not singular, existence. It is the existence that we attribute to a property or to a concept when we say that it it instantiated.  'Cats exist' says that the concept CAT has instances.  It is not about any particular cats, and because it is not, it does not attribute to any particular cat existence. 'Honesty exists' in ordinary English says that some people are honest, that the virtue honesty has instances. But of course those instances, honest men and women, must themselves exist. Their existence is singular existence. The latter, however, is presupposed by the so-called 'existential' quantifier and cannot be expressed by it.

Interim Conclusion   

Here is the predicament we are in. Presentism about what exists seems to make sense and seems to be a a substantive (non-tautological) thesis about a metaphysically weighty topic, that of the relation of time and existence: Only what exists at present exists. But the thesis collapses into a miserable tautology if the second occurrence of 'exists' is present-tensed.  So I went on a hunt for a sense of 'exists' that is not present-tensed.  But nothing I came up with fits the bill or The Bill.

David, I fear, will simply acquiesce in tautological  presentism, option (A) above. But 'surely' we are in the presence of a genuine metaphysical question!  Or so I will argue.

Your move, David.

I post what I like, and I like what I post. It's a nostalgia trip, and a generational thing. There's no point in disputing taste or sensibility, or much of anything else. It's Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, stop thinking, and FEEL!

Traveling Wilburys, End of Line, Extended Version

"The best you can do is forgive."

Who, Won't Get Fooled Again. Lyrics! 

Gary U. S. Bonds, From a Buick Six. Sorry, Bob, but not even you can touch this version.

Bob Dylan, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes  a Train to Cry.  Cutting Edge Bootleg version.

Bob Dylan, Just Like a Woman.  This Cutting Edge take may be the best version, even with the mistakes. I'll say no more, lest I gush.

Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound. The Bard never loses his touch. May he die with his boots on.

Bob Dylan, Corrina, Corrina. And you say he can't sing in a conventional way?

Moody Blues, Wildest Dreams. Nostalgia City.

Johnny Cash, I've Been Everywhere, Man

Soggy Bottom Boys, Man of Constant Sorrow

This new online journal looks really good.  From the 'About' page:

Our editorial choices are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.

I too oppose libertinism and libertarianism.  I note in passing that they in some respects feed each other. See Libertarians and Drug Legalization and Arizona Pot Prop 205 Defeated.

A compact is a political union drawing together different people for a common end. It is neither a contract nor a covenant, neither a market relation nor a religious sodality. It depends not on shared blood, but on shared purpose. We are concerned with advancing this properly political form of solidarity.

I too am opposed to the Blut und Boden mentality of some on the alternative Right. I have come out strongly against tribalism and race-based nationalism while conceding that in the present circumstances a certain amount of pro tempore white tribalism may be necessary to counter our political enemies effectively.  In a war you must do things that you don't want to do and would not have to do in times of peace.

That being said and well understood, I am skeptical of finding "shared purpose" with people from radically different cultures.  What "shared purpose" could we have with sharia-supporting Muslims,  to take but one example?

We believe that the ideology of liberalism is at odds with the virtue of liberality. We oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.

That's strange. The touchstone of classical liberalism is precisely toleration.  I wonder how these boys are using 'liberalism.'

Compact will challenge the overclass that controls government, culture, and capital. Whoever does this is bound to be called radical. We do not shy from the label, but we insist on its proper meaning. Rightly understood, to be radical does not mean going to extremes. It means getting to the root of things.

Very good. 'Radical' is from the Latin radix, meaning root. A radical goes to the root of the matter. But not like the Communists who literally e-rad-icated (uprooted) their class enemies breaking millions of eggs for an impossible omelet. (That's what we call a mixed metaphor, by the way.)

The trick here is to avoid both deracination and a form of autochthony rooted in soil and nourished by blood. We need to find the via media between Bodenlosigkeit and Bodengebundenheit.

One more pun. I have come out against, not masculinity, but toxic masculinity which could be characterized as Blut und Hoden, blood and balls, given the tendency of some on the alt-Right to embrace toxic masculinity in conjunction with an illiberal attachment to the indigenous.

Humanity certainly has its work cut out for it, assuming we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion. 

I stand for free speech against the fascists of both the Left and the Right. And so I wish the COMPACT-ers all the best.