Was this pseudo-con ever on it? See here for a meaty extract from his most recent NYT column.
The rejoinder by NT scholar Robert Gagnon is good.
I define my position over against that of French in my hard-hitting Substack entry, David French, Christianity, and Politics.
Three Dreher pieces at the top of his 'Stack.' I am especially interested in comments from U. K. readers.
'A Riot is the Language of the Unheard'
Is the world coming apart or is the world coming apart?
Filed under: Decline of the West
(369 entries and counting)
Having ditched his mindless anti-Trumpery, Rod Dreher is serving up better content than ever. Take a gander at the bullet points in this piece.
Here is an article on the Islamization of Vienna. The decadent Austrians and the rest of the decadent Europeans need to take a lesson from the Orange Man, "in the arena, bloodied but unbowed," and his fight, Fight, FIGHT!
A soupçon of sanity returns to the body politic. Roger Kimball:
“Upon careful study of the foundational challenges raised in the Motion,” Cannon wrote in her ninety-three-page ruling, “the Court is convinced that Special Counsel’s Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme — the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law.”
Result? “The Superseding Indictment is DISMISSED because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.”
Hit the road, Jack (and don’t you come back no more).
In another encouraging development, Elon Musk delivered a stinging rebuke to that noisome knucklehead Newsom by ordering the transfer of X and SpaceX from San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, to Texas.
According to the WSJ, Musk plans to pony up $45 million per month to a pro-Trump Super Pac.
The tables are beginning to turn. But no complacency! We know a priori that our political enemies will cheat their asses off as they did last time. It is important that we not only defeat them electorally but also demoralize them by crushing them in a landslide. All hands on deck!
Outstanding oratory last night at the RNC meeting #2 in Milwaukee. The best speeches in my view were by Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, and Ben Carson, in that order. The ordinary citizens who came forward were also impressive with their tales of tragedy caused by the insanely destructive immigration policies of Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, and the Deep State reprobates who pull their strings.
This Stack topper proposes a generalization of the age-old principle from Roman law, ultra posse nemo obligatur.
Excerpt:
This is an important topic because having the wrong ideals is worse than having no ideals at all. Many think that to be idealistic is good. But surely it is not good without qualification. Think of National Socialist ideals, Communist ideals, DEI-driven ‘wokester’ ideals and of their youthful and earnest and sincere proponents. Those are wrongheaded ideals, and some of them are wrongheaded because not realizable. The classless society; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the racially pure society; the society in which everyone is made materially equal by the power of the state including the states’ agents of equalization. Ideals like these cannot be achieved, and if the attempt is made terrible evils will be the upshot. The Commies broke a lot of eggs in the 20th century (100 million by some estimates) but still didn't achieve their fabulous and impossible omelet.
Their ideals were not realizable because not warranted by the actual facts of human nature. The possibility of their realization was merely imagined, merely ‘cooked up’ or excogitated in the febrile heads of such utopians as the Nowhere Man John Lennon.
When the USA is no more, what will future historians point to as the main causes of our collapse? One of them will be the foolish immigration policy that got its start in the '60s. Somehow we collectively forgot that
How many of these points do you agree with? How is it that we have collectively lost our minds in respect of these (obvious) points? What are the chances of a return to sanity? How long before we collapse into hot civil war? Are you ready?
U-Haul is raking it in these days renting moving vans and trailers to folks eager to flee such Dementocratic crapholes as San Francisco for rather more habitable places far from the Left Coast. Why then no Jew-Haul? Because the Jews ain't goin' nowhere, to allude to a song written by a Jew. Bill Maher makes the point, displaying along the way considerable historical savvy.
He also says something that supports the point I make in my Pollyanna post:
History is brutal, and humans are not good people. History's sad and full of wrongs but you can't make them unhappen because a paraglider isn't a time machine. People get moved, and yes, colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century. And they didn't do it by asking.
Maher is dead wrong on much, like the late Christopher Hitchens (d. 15 Dec 2011), but both are/were brilliant, articulate, courageous, and right about much.
I stand with them for free speech, open inquiry, the life of the mind and against the anti-civilizational forces of wokery and Islamism. And that is why I stand with the Jews.
London Ed sends the following:
‘this mirror image of this face’
That’s a referring expression which refers to something. Does it refer to the same thing as ‘this face’ refers to? If so, it is problematic.
'This mirror image' does indeed refer to something. It refers to a mirror image. 'This face' also refers to something. It refers to the face of the man standing before the mirror and looking into it (not at it). Now no one's face is identical to a mirror image. (If there were no artificial or natural mirrors, there would be no mirror images, but there could still be faces of men and other animals.)
So I say that the two demonstrative uses of 'this' have numerically different referents. When I say 'this mirror image,' I point toward the mirror; when I say 'this face' I point toward my face. The two different directions of demonstration shows that the two occurrences of 'this' have numerically different referents.
But knowing Ed, he has something up his sleeve; there is some puzzle in the offing. He needs to remind me what it is.
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.
"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!
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)
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.
