Category: Varia

April 30th, 1945, Berlin

Why did Hitler commit suicide on this day in his bunker in Berlin in 1945?  One reason was that he didn't want to end up like Mussolini and his girlfriend.

I was in Hitler's suicide bunker.

Despite the attempts on Hitler's life, in particular Claus von Stauffenberg's of July 1944, the Leader of the 1000 Year Reich died by his own hand. 

Addendum.  I woke up in the middle of the night and asked myself how Hitler could have known how Mussolini and his girlfriend ended up.  After all, the execution of the two Italians occurred on 29 April, 1945, the day before Hitler's murder of Eva Braun and his suicide.  Could Hitler in his Berlin bunker have gotten word that quickly?  Apparently yes, as I discovered when I pulled Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Penguin, 2002) from the shelf of my well-stocked library:

Apart from Himmler's betrayal, Hitler's other great preoccupation remained his fear of being taken alive by the Russians.  News had come through of Mussolini's execution by partisans and how the bodies of the Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been hoisted upside down in Milan.  A transcript of the radio report had been prepared in the special outsized 'Fuehrer typeface' which saved Hitler from wearing spectacles.  It was presumably Hitler who underlined in pencil the words 'hanged upside down.'  (p. 357)

For another excerpt from Beevor's book, one  which recounts the savage rape inflicted upon German women by the Soviet army as it approached Berlin from the east, see  They raped every German female from eight to 80.

It is important  to rub one's nose in the horrors of history as prophylaxis against the dangerous utopianism of progressives with their Rousseauean fantasies about  man as inherently good. Man is capable of some good, but he is not inherently good.  The study of the history of just the 20th century should disabuse one of that notion once and for all.

The Need for Logico-Philosophical Umpires

Tammy-bruce-snubnose-vertical

The following is from the Powerblogs archive.  Originally posted 5 November 2005.

Can't get a job teaching philosophy? Perhaps you can market yourself as a talk show umpire. There is a dire need for argumentative quality control on the shout circuit.

Last night I was pleased to see my favorite gun-totin' lesbian on Hannity and Colmes, the irrepressible Tammy Bruce. (That's her above with her pal 'Snubby.'  The gal needs a lesson in trigger discipline: 'Get yer booger-hooker off the bang switch!') At one point, Bruce came out against governmental wealth redistribution via the tax code. Colmes the liberal replied in effect: So you're opposed to taxation!

At this point, a competent umpire would have called a timeout and thrown Colmes into the penalty box. For he committed a truly grotesque conceptual mistake by gratuitously assuming that it is somehow built into the very concept of taxation that it should involve redistribution of wealth. Taxation is the process whereby monies are extracted from the populace to offset the costs of government. There is nothing in the nature of taxation as such to require a 'progressive' scheme of taxation. Otherwise, a flat tax would be a contradiction in terms.

Here is an analogy. Suppose I warn you not to confuse insurance with investment and advise you to buy a term life insurance policy. An insurance agent, eager to line his own pockets, objects: So you're
opposed to insurance! The counterresponse is that there is nothing in the concept of life insurance to require that it have any investment  features. An umpire on the scene would slap a penalty on the greedy agent.

Of course, my umpire proposal is utopian. Average viewers apparently like shouting and mindless contention. They wouldn't put up with any close analysis or careful argument assessment. Ratings would plummet.   Hannity and his sidekick would be out of a job.

This  begs raises the question: Are the masses inherently stupid, or have they been stupefied by the media? The answer, I suspect, is both: thinking is hard work and even people with an aptitude for it are not inclined to engage in it. But it is also the case that the media do not encourage thoughtfulness and are quite willing to pander to their audiences to turn a buck.

It is the ugly side of capitalism; but socialism and government control of the media would obviously be a disaster.

The solution? C-Span and cyberspace. (By the way, I apologize for my uses of 'masses'; I thereby violated my own rule that a conservative  should not talk like a leftist. So maybe I shouldn't have used   'capitalism' either.)

Regalia

Regalia, as its etymology suggests (from L. rex, regis), are the king's insignia. By a natural extension, anyone's insignia, colors, banners. We like to fly the colors to the point of identifying with them. We identify with flags and labels and logos and certain words. There is a stupid satisfaction one gets from flaunting logos like 'Trek' and 'Jeep.' See? Me ride Trek bike. Just like Lance Armstrong.

The name of my Bell bicycle helmet model is 'Paradox.' That clinched the purchase for me.

Philosophers hate a contradiction but love a paradox.

Things Not Worth Knowing

One's own genealogy, for example. What does it matter who begat whom in one's line?  Most of us will discover the names and dates of insignificant people who have left nothing behind but their names
and dates.

Or is it just a philosopher's prejudice to be concerned more with timeless universals than with temporal particulars? To thrill to the Thoreauvian admonition, "Read not The Times, read the eternities"?

Of Cranks and Crackpots

London Ed quotes neurologist Steven Novella who makes an insightful observation in Cranks and Physics (the whole of which is well worth reading):

… cranks around the world have been able to form their own “alternative” community, publish their own journals, and have their own meetings. There is just one requirement in this alternative community – acceptance. All ideas are accepted (there is no chaff, all is wheat), that is except for one. Whatever is accepted by mainstream science is wrong [my emphasis]. That is “the one ring” of crank mythology, that brings all crank theories together and in the darkness of their community binds them together. Otherwise they are largely mutually incompatible. Each crank’s “theory of everything” is a notion unto itself, and is mutually exclusive to every other crank’s own theory of everything (unless there is some incidental overlap). So they get together, present their theories without criticism, and all agree that the evil conspiracy of mainstream science must be taken down. Of course, if any of them got their way and their ideas became accepted, they would instantly become rejected by the rest of the crank community as mainstream physics.

Ed comments:

Correct. My enemy's enemy is my friend, whatever my enemy believes. I have seen this effect in Wikipedia a number of times. Cranks unite to defeat the mainstream, orthodox view. Orthodox editors get blocked or banned. Cranks then war with each other, and get banned themselves. The orthodox editors mount appeals to the powers that be – the arbitration committee, none of whom have any expert credentials as far as I can see, and get unbanned. Or they just open 'sockpuppet' accounts and start editing again under a different name. So do the cranks, and the whole nightmare begins again. Another difficulty that Novella omits is 'mainstream' crankery. That is, bad science or quackery that unites its practitioners by financial interest. Homeopathy and 'Neurolinguistic programming' are good examples of this.

This would not matter at all, if Wikipedia were not increasingly used as a 'reliable source' by students, and even some medical researchers, as I noted in an earlier post.

Internet Crackpots and the Perils of Autodidacticism

One of the (very minor) drawbacks of having a Web presence is that one becomes the target of crackpot e-mail from people like this.  He describes himself as an autodidact, thereby illustrating the perils of autodidacticism. 

And yet some negotiate the straits of autodidacticism quite well, Eric Hoffer for example.  In general, however, he who educates himself has a fool for a pupil. That being said, I advise a modicum of skepticism concerning academic credentials.

If you expect to have 'cred' in the 'sphere, it helps to have established credibility in peer-reviewed venues.  Some of my publications are listed here, at PhilPapers. 

It comes as no great surprise that the crackpot in question is an anti-Semite.

Khan Academy

60 Minutes last night did a segment on the Khan Academy, an online source of short tutorials in mathematics, science, and other subjects.  A wonderful resource for homeschoolers and anyone interested in filling in the gaps in his education.  I viewed a couple of algebra and a couple of probability lectures last night and found them to be of high quality.  Recommended by Bill Gates.

On Hairsplitting

As a follow-up to Anti-Intellectualism in Conservatives, here is an old post from the Powerblogs site.  A surprising number still languish there in cyber-limbo awaiting their turn to be brought back to life. 

………………….

The charge of hairsplitting has always been one of the weapons in the arsenal of the anti-intellectual. One root of anti-intellectualism is a churlish hatred of all refinement. Another is laziness. Just as there are slugs who will not stray from their couches without the aid of motorized transport, there are mental slugs who will not engage in what Hegel calls die Anstrengung des Begriffs, the exertion of the   concept. Thinking is hard work. One has to be careful, one has to be precise; one has to carve the bird of reality at the joints. It is no surprise that people don't like thinking. It goes against our slothful grain. But surely any serious thinking about any topic issues in the making of distinctions that to the untutored may seem strained and  unnecessary.

Consider the question of when it is appropriate to praise a person.

Should we praise a person who has merely done his duty? Should we praise people who feed, clothe, house, and educate their children? Should wives praise their husbands for being faithful, as I once heard Dennis Prager recommend?  Of course not. For this is what they ought to do. We ought not praise them for doing such things; we ought to condemn them for not doing them. Praise is due only those actions that are above and beyond the call of duty. Such actions are called supererogatory. So we have a distinction between the obligatory and the supererogatory. The former pertains to those actions that must be done or else left undone, while the latter to those actions that are non-obligatory but such that if they are done they bring moral credit upon their agents.

Is that hairsplitting? Obviously not. We are in the presence of a genuine distinction. One would have to quite obtuse not to discern it. Clarity in moral matters demands the making of this distinction, and plenty of others besides.

A second example. The phrase, 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' will strike some as containing redundant verbiage. But there are three distinct notions here since one can tell the truth without telling the whole truth, and one can tell the whole truth without telling nothing but the truth. This is not hairsplitting, but the making of necessary distinctions. Necessary for what? Necessary for clarity of thought. Why is that a good thing? Because clarity of thought is required for ethical action and for prudent action.

So what is hairsplitting if this is supposed to be something objectionable? One idea is that it is to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.

But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. A chess player must know when the game is drawn. One way to draw a chess game is by three-fold repetition of position. But there
is a distinction between a consecutive and a nonconsecutive three-fold repetition of position, a distinction many players do not appreciate. When it is explained to them, as it is here some react with hairsplitting!

The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires. He is parading before us his lack of culture and mental acuity and his churlish refusal to be instructed.

Too many conservatives are like this.

Should You Trust Wikipedia?

Ed of Beyond Necessity asked me my opinion of the following passage from the Wikipedia article, Destiny.

In daily language destiny and fate are synonymous, but with regards to 20th century philosophy the words gained inherently different meanings.

For Arthur Schopenhauer destiny was just a manifestation of the Will to Live. Will to Live is for him the main aspect of the living. The animal cannot be aware of the Will, but men can at least see life through its perspective, though it is the primary and basic desire. But this fact is a pure irrationality and then, for Schopenhauer, human desire is equally futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so is all human action. Therefore, the Will to Live can be at the same time living fate and choice of overrunning the fate same, by means of the Art, of the Morality and of the Ascesis.

For Nietzsche destiny keeps the form of Amor fati (Love of Fate) through the important element of Nietzsche's philosophy, the "will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), the basis of human behavior, influenced by the Will to Live of Schopenhauer. But this concept may have even other senses, although he, in various places, saw the will to power as a strong element for adaptation or survival in a better way.[3] In its later forms Nietzsche's concept of the will to power applies to all living things, suggesting that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, less important than the desire to expand one’s power. Nietzsche eventually took this concept further still, and transformed the idea of matter as centers of force into matter as centers of will to power as mankind’s destiny to face with amor fati.

The expression Amor fati is used repeatedly by Nietzsche as acceptation-choice of the fate, but in such way it becomes even another thing, precisely a “choice” destiny.

Ed tells me that the above strikes him as "gibberish."  Well, if not pure gibberish, then very, very  bad.  First of all, the writing is awkward and inept and in places incoherent. 

In the first sentence the author mentions 20th century philosophy and then immediately goes on to speak of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both 19th century thinkers.  Could the author be so clueless as not to know when these gentlemen lived and wrote?

"Will to Live is the main aspect of the living."  Sentences like his are part of why I rejoice in no longer being a professor.  First of all, Will cannot be described as an aspect of anything: 'aspect'  suggests a view, an appearance, a representation (Vorstellung), a phenomenon.  Schopenhauer's Will, however, plays in his system the role that the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)  plays in Kant's.  Will is noumenal, not phenomenal, and so cannot be coherently described as an aspect. One ought to have gathered this just from the title of Schopenhauer's magnum opus, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.  Second, Will is what everything is at bottom, not just living things.

I won't continue through the passage.  It is bad throughout.  What I hated about teaching was having to wade through garbage like this.  How does one explain to an incompetent writer what competent writing is?  It is like trying to explain to a nerd why his pocket protector is a sartorial outrage or why pulling your pants up too high is 'uncool' or why socks with sandals don't make it.  Or how do you explain to a socially lame person why she is socially lame?  What do you do? Give her rules to follow?  But such rules come too late.

I do not take as harsh a view of Wikipedia as Ed does.  There is much of value in its pages, and plenty of the material is arcana that cannot be found elsewhere.  But one cannot really trust anything one finds there since there is no way of knowing who wrote what and what his credentials are.

Let Caveat lector! be your watch-phrase, then, when you make use of this online resource.

Addendum:  Mark Anderson recommends The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia.