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It is a stereotype without foundation in reality that all stereotypes lack a foundation in reality.

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

The Dems are a species of necrophiliac: they love dead voters. Not only that, they have the power to 'raise' them.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man and man alone among living things has a higher origin and a higher destiny. Made in the image and likeness of God, and the only creature so made, he comes from God and is called to return to God for his ultimate felicity and fulfillment. He is, to be sure, an animal, but one called to theosis and thus an animal qualitatively different from every other type of animal. 

In that now languishing tradition, man had a calling, a vocation.

But God is dead, culturally speaking, at least among the the elites of the West, and since 1859 the qualitative superiority of the human animal is no longer much believed in. Man is back among the animals, 'in series' with them, just another product of evolution, whose origin is measly and whose destiny is extinction.  Man on a naturalist construal is at best quantitatively superior to his non-human progenitors.

Read the whole thing at MavPhil StrictPhil.

Peter Geach on the Real Distinction I

Here:

Horowitz destroys the argument for reparations, and in a second chapter, he challenges the victimization logic that offers white racism as the excuse for any "underperformance" by the black community.  There is no one alive today who held any slaves or personally was a slave.  Many black Americans in the country today have no ancestors in America who were slaves.  A majority of Americans are descended from people who came to the United States after the Civil War and bear no guilt for the ugly practice in one region of the United States two centuries ago.  Those who are descended from people who lived in the states that did not join the Confederacy have 400,000 dead Union soldiers, plus many hundreds of thousands injured, as their sacrifice to liberating the slaves and preserving the Union.  Reparations for Japanese-Americans in the United States or Holocaust survivors in Europe were paid to people who had themselves lived through specific horrors or criminal behavior by governments.  Must all Americans today pay for something that ended over 150 years ago and for which a bloody war was fought?  Are all African-Americans equally entitled to compensation for something that impacted some of their ancestors seven generations back?

The victimization theme – that white racism is solely responsible for the economic situation of black Americans, their higher crime rates and poor academic performance, eliminates any agency for individuals to beat the odds or take advantage of the increased opportunities that are now available, including trillions spent on social welfare programs over the past half-century, much of that designed to address the needs of African-Americans.  These programs include affirmative action admissions to universities and similar approaches to hiring by corporations and other firms.  Martin Luther King was aware that racism and discrimination were present in 1960s America, as was segregation in large parts of the country, but he believed that these should not be an excuse for black American behavior that only worsened their plight.  Charlatans and race-hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have dominated the civil rights movement since King's death, always pushing the white racism bogeyman, while those more in line with King's legacy, including Jason Riley, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and Glen Loury, are ignored or condemned as sell-outs.  Arguing that cultural norms within a community can be damaging to the success of future generations is simply a forbidden theme – witness the recent campaign against University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax.

"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)

Sarah Vaughn, Broken Hearted Melody.  Nostalgic video. Fine understated guitar work.

Timi Yuro, Hurt.  When I first heard her back in '61, I thought she had to be black. She's not black, but of Italian extraction: Rosemarie Timotea Auro. 

Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You

Roy Orbison, In Dreams. "The best voice in the business," said E. P.  See how many of the sidemen you can identify.

Peggy Lee, Oh You Crazy Moon. 

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  

Etta James, At Last

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell For You

Elvis Presley, I Can't Help Falling in Love with You

Kay Starr, Stormy Weather

Julie London, When I Fall in Love

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind. I've enjoyed this song since I was six years old. Ill take Lady Gogi over Lady Gaga any day.

Not a torch song, but the video is cute: 

Jay and the Americans, Come a Little Bit Closer

UPDATE (11/5)

Ed contributes:

You posted a very fine 1938 recording of ‘The Very Thought Of You’ by Billie Holiday. If I am not mistaken, the sax is Lester Young (‘prez’), who Kerouac worshipped, and who supposedly gave young Jack (in 1943) his first taste of the wacky baccy. See this.

There is a London connection here. The song was written by Ray Noble, and first recorded (with Al Bowlly, vocal) in London April 21, 1934. Noble was born in Brighton in 1903, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and become one of the great British band leaders of the 1930s. He later moved to New York. His well-known ‘Cherokee’ was an obsession of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, who made it the basis of his 1945 composition Ko-Ko. As I am sure you know.

Your musical catholicity amazes me, Ed. Rare is the hombre who can dig both Hank Williams and Charlie Parker, not to mention Robert Johnson and Robert Schumann.

Judy Collins, Cravings: How I Conquered Food, Doubleday 2017, pp. 112-113:

. . . and writing Albert Grossmann that no, I did not want to join a trio of women he was bent on calling the Brown-Eyed Girls. He had put Peter, Paul and Mary together, telling me that I was the fallback choice if Mary hadn't worked out. Albert saw how I was struggling and didn't think I could make it on my own, hence the trio idea. It was to be me, Judy Henske and Jo Mapes. He told me he would get me brown contacts, his idea of a joke — Henske had brown eyes and Mapes and I would have to get brown contacts. I had agreed hastily — after all, he had made Peter, Paul and Mary into an international franchise. Now I changed my yes to a no. I would go it on my own, no matter what. I was going to do it my way or die trying.

Way to go, Judy. You pulled it off and beat your addictions as well.

Judy Collins, Both Sides Now.  Wonderful. My favorite version, however, is that of Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters.

Judy Collins, Someday Soon

Judy Collins, Amazing Grace

Judy Henske, High Flying Bird

Judy Henske, Any Day Now

Judy Henske, Till the Real Thing Comes Along

Jo Mapes, You Were on My Mind. Beautiful, but takes a little getting used to if you are coming at it from the We Five hit version. Ian Sylvia have a great version. 

Jo Mapes, No One to Talk My Troubles To 

Here.

But aren't such values racist by definition?

Kurt Schlichter:

. . . Nazis are so bad that you have to devote all your hating capacity to hating Nazis such that there's no room left to hate anybody else. Those hammer and sickle flag-carrying Communists? Well, you must love the Nazis if you hate them, because you have got to hate the Nazis with all your mind and all your heart since, as we learned this week, Nazis are bad. I'm so glad that our moral betters have this all figured out.

I would have thought that one could and should morally condemn numerous groups all at once including the fascists of the Left who have the chutzpah to name themselves 'antifa,' the thugs of Black Lives Matter, that vicious anti-cop operation that takes its inspiration from brazen lies about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown of Ferguson 'fame,' the leftist termites who have infiltrated the universities and preside over the shouting-down of the speakers of truth, Muslim terrorists and their leftist enablers, and so on — but not excluding Nazis and neo-Nazis.

It has been fascinating to watch, over the last ten days or so, so-called conservatives falling all over themselves in a crazy attempt to achieve the apotheosis of high dudgeon in the condemnation of one relatively minor bunch of scumbags. Why? So that leftists will finally like you? Forget about it. It won't happen. To them you will always be a racist no matter what you say or do.  

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Bending to popular demand, here is some more about the Summer of Love, now 50 years in the past. A re-do and clean-up of an entry from five years ago.

………………

Nostalgia time again.  Scott McKenzie, famous for the 1967 anthem "San Francisco" penned by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, died at 73 in 2012.  Gen-X-er Mick LaSalle gets it exactly right in his commentary:

The thing about that song is that . . . however naive and even sanctimonious it might be, it is so clearly a true expression of a mindset, of a vision, of a moment in time, of a generation, of an aspiration that, even if it is singing about a San Francisco that never happened and a dream that never came true and never really had a chance of coming true, and that had only a scant relationship with reality . . . it’s a precious thing.  It’s a document of a moment, but more than that, a perfect poetic expression of that moment.

It was not MY youth, but I can recognize in that song and in the purity of McKenzie’s vocal something that is as unmistakably honest, in its way, as Gershwin playing the piano, or Fred Astaire dancing, or Artie Shaw playing the clarinet.  It is youth finding itself in the world and saying the most beautiful thing it can think of saying at that particular moment. You can’t laugh that away.  You have to treasure that.  Really, you have to love it.

Speaking of the Mamas and Papas, here are some of my favorites:  Dedicated to the One I Love (1967), a cover almost as good as the Shirelles original.  But it is hard to touch the Shirelles.

[Correction: H. Fisher in a comment points out that the "5" Royales did it first, in 1957. Or at least before the Shirelles. Some of these songs go back a long way.]

Twelve Thirty.  Creeque Alley with great video. California Dreamin'.

And then there's Eric Burdon and the Animals, San Franciscan Nights from '67.

The so-called Summer of Love transpired 50 years ago. (Some of my reminiscences of the Monterey Pop Festival of that same summer of '67 are reported here.) Ted Nugent, the guru of kill and grill, and a rocker singularly without musical merit in my humble opinion,  offers some rather intemperate reflections in a Wall Street Journal piece, The Summer of Drugs. Excerpts:

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

[. . .]

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what it truly was.

Although I am not inclined to disagree too strenuously with Nugent's indictment, especially when it comes to drug-fueled self-destruction, Nugent misses much that was positive in those days. For one thing, there was the amazing musical creativity of the period, as represented by Dylan and the Beatles above all. The summer of '67 saw the debut of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP of the lads from Liverpool. This creativity stood in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music. Has there been anything before or since in popular music that has come up the level of the best of Dylan? That is what we call a rhetorical question.

Perhaps I should give an example of '50s vapidity. How about Perry Como, Magic Moments? It came out in 1960, I believe, the last year of the 1950s. Of course, songs like this were also found aplenty in the '60s. My point, however, is that they were not characteristic of the '60s as they were of the prior decades in American popular music. Ours was a music of engagement, not escape.  A good example is Phil Ochs' There But for Fortune.

The '60s also offered welcome relief from the dreary materialism and social conformism of the '50s. My generation saw through the emptiness of a life devoted to social oneupsmanship, status-seeking, and the piling up of consumer goods. We were an idealistic generation. We wanted something more out of life than job security in suburbia. (Frank Zappa: "Do your job, do it right! Life's a ball, TV tonight!")

We were seekers and questers, though there is no denying that some of us were suckers for charlatans and pied pipers like Timothy Leary. We took on the Big Questions, even if we did so via dubious popularizers such as Alan Watts. We questioned the half-hearted pieties and platitudes and hypocrisies of our elders. Some of the questioning was puerile and dangerously utopian, but at least we were questioning. We wanted life and we wanted it in abundance in rebellion against the deadness we perceived around us. We experimented with psychedelics to open the doors of perception, not to get loaded. 

(Trivia questions: name the title of the book to which I allude with 'doors of perception,' its author, his place of residence in later life, and the Los Angeles band that took its name from the title.)

We were a destructive generation as well, a fact documented in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. But the picture Nugent paints is onesided. Here is Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" which was one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. It is a great version by Alanis Morissette and uploaded to YouTube by our very own London Ed.

Or give a listen to the Youngblood's Get Together.  This song captures the positive spirit of the '60s, a spirit not much in evidence nowadays. 

The Who, Pictures of Lily

Paul Simon, Kodachrome. Simon was an English major whose early efforts were sometimes a bit on the pretentious side. Dangling Conversation, for example. (Still and all, a great song.) Later on he found his groove.

Safaris, Image of a Girl

Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition

The Band, When I Paint my Masterpiece

Howlin' Wolf, I Want Your Picture. Not to be confused with Howlin' Wolff.

Annette Hanshaw, If Had a Talking Picture of You, 1929

Kinks, Pictures in the Sand

Kinks, People Take Pictures of Each Other 

Kinks, Picture Book

Ringo Starr, Photograph

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ordinals and Cardinals > 10

I wonder what went though Fidel Castro's mind in his last days and hours.  Did he remain firm in his materialist faith? Such a faith unshakably maintained would be a great consolation to a mass murderer in his last moments.  But Fidel was educated by Salesians and Jesuits and so it might have been that the hour of death was a horror to him in which his materialist faith crumbled and the faces of those he had had tortured and murdered rose up before him in his mind's eye.

And then there is the case of Joseph Stalin:

A story I heard personally from Malcolm Muggeridge (that stirred me then and still does even yet) was his account of a conversation he had with Svetlana Stalin, the daughter of Josef Stalin. She spent some time with Muggeridge in his home in England while they were working together on their BBC production on the life of her father. According to Svetlana, as Stalin lay dying, plagued with terrifying hallucinations, he suddenly sat halfway up in bed, clenched his fist toward the heavens once more, fell back upon his pillow, and was dead.

The incredible irony of his whole life is that at one time Josef Stalin had been a seminary student, preparing for the ministry. Coming of Nietzschean age, he made a decisive break from his belief in God. This dramatic and complete reversal of conviction that resulted in his hatred for all religion is why Lenin had earlier chosen Stalin and positioned him in authority—a choice Lenin too late regretted. (The name Stalin, which means “steel,” was not his real name, but was given to him by his contemporaries who fell under the steel-like determination of his will.) And as Stalin lay dying, his one last gesture was a clenched fist toward God, his heart as cold and hard as steel.

Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God, (Word Publ., Dallas: 1994), p. 26.

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Before You Mourn Fidel Castro, Here's What The Left Doesn't Want You To See

Does it make sense to ask how probable God's existence is?  I don't think so.  God is more like truth than like a truth. One can sensibly ask after the probability of, say, The Dems will take back the House in 2018.   It would make sense to say that this is likely, unlikely, more likely than not; that it has a 40-50% chance, etc.  

But to ask after the probability of there being truths at all is to ask an incoherent question.  Suppose someone were to say: it is more likely than not that there are truths, or: the likelihood of there being some truths is 27.5%

You can see that this is nonsense.  

What I write on this blog and elsewhere implies that this is also nonsense with respect to God.  God is not a being among beings, but Being itself.  Would it makes sense to say that the probability of there being Being itself is 27.5%?

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Fallibilism and Objectivism

The Left wails about 'post-truth' politics – but it's quite happy to wallow in them

Mark Steyn (HT: Bill Keezer):

"The object of Parliament," observed Winston Churchill at election time in 1951, "is to substitute argument for fisticuffs."

How's that holding up after November 8th? The object of at least a proportion of those on the streets is to substitute fisticuffs for argument, and indeed for Parliament: The less self-aware even chant "This is what democracy looks like!" – by which they mean not the election but the post-election riots and looting and assaults. Some among these self-proclaimed champions of women and immigrants wish to substitute rape for argument, a cause of such broad appeal that the ideological enforcers at the monopoly social-media cartels breezily permitted the hashtag "Rape Melania" to "trend" on Twitter.

Read it all.