Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Sohrab Ahmari, Can Trump be Stopped?
Paul Gottfried, Why Lenin is No Longer Relevant
Samuel Gregg, Knowledge's Limits and a Nobel Economist's Humility
Victor Davis Hanson, The Hysterical Style in American Politics
D. Parker, Can the Left Peacefully Coexist with Us? My answer: No. Investment tip: buy Au and Pb.
. . . when you find charming in her what would be annoying in others.
The Unhinged Among Us (VDH)
The Destruction of the Middle Class
The Human Costs of Pornography
Attack on Elon Musk is About Freedom of Thought
Roots of Hamas Lie in Hitler's 'Final Solution'
HEINRICH HOFFMANN COLLECTION
Adolf Hitler met Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, Nov. 28, 1941, in Berlin. Al-Husseini collaborated with Nazis in planning ‘final solution’ in the Middle East. He was ally of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, reactionary Islamist group that gave birth to Hamas in 1987.
The last four horrible years make my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:
And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
This is no longer true. We are no longer the "land of the free," let alone "the home of the brave." We are in steep decline. You are not free if you cannot express your thoughtful, fact-based, and heart-felt opinions without fear of reprisal. Step out of line and you run the risk of being destroyed, if not physically, then politically and economically. Examples are legion. Here is one of an increasing many.
Still and all, we have much something to be grateful for. But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, what remains of our liberty, and our "sweet land of liberty." Patriots are waking up to the depredations of 'Woke' and there is reason to be hopeful. So be of good cheer, do your bit, and long live the Republic! Never give up, never give in, fight hard, and fight to win. There are a lot of us and we can win if we hang together which, to paraphrase a Founder, beats hanging separately.
I found the above witticism in an essay by Kelly James Clark. It works in German as well:
Hier (ver)stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.
In German the allusion to what I allude to is transparent to my class of readers.
I'll book this quickie under Varia.
The tuxedo cat is the most 'iconic' of cats; so it is only fitting that Max Black and his brother Manny K. Black should guard the entrance to the inner sanctum.
Felix was a tuxie as was Sylvester. And who can forget Socks the presidential pussy when the Clintons occupied the White House?
Like all cats the tuxie has nine lives; what distinguishes him is that he is always dressed to the nines. All dressed up with nowhere to go.
I offer a comment of mine as an example. It is a brief response to a Substack entry by Elliot Crozat. Here is the comment:
Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead are nonexistent objects: they do not exist, but they have being, and have properties. Indeed, they actually have properties; it is not just that they could have properties. So on this view, there is no bar to a dead person's having the property of being communal or standing in the communal relation to other dead persons. This quasi-Meinongian view is skillfully developed by Palle Yourgrau in Death and Nonexistence (Oxford, 2019). It of course has problems of its own.
(5) and (7) are undoubtedly true.
And I agree with you that (1) is reasonably rejected on eternalism which is a plausible alternative to presentism. Surely wholly past individuals are not nothing despite their not being temporally present. They exist, but not at present. Presentists, despite a lot of fancy footwork, have a hard time accounting for this plain fact. This is one reason why eternalism is well-represented among contemporary philosophers. Eternalism allows for a watered-down personal immortality which has been embraced by Einstein, Charles Hartshorne, and most recently by John Leslie. The main difficulty of eternalism is to give a clear account of existence simpliciter. But it appears that the presentist faces the same difficulty assuming that "Only the present exists" is not a miserable tautology that boils down to "Only what exists (present tense) exists (present tense."
As for Aristotle, he is standardly taken to be a presentist (see Feser, e.g.) and thus your invocation of the Stagirite in support of eternalism is questionable.
Here:
Amazon locked a Microsoft engineer out of his smart home devices for nearly a week after a delivery driver accused him of uttering a racial slur.
Via Malcolm Pollack, who is always worth reading.
Did you throw away your useless made-in-China COVID face masks? Yes? Too bad. They now have a use in places like New York City.
If someone is firing a shotgun at you it would be futile to take cover behind a chain link fence. But if you are being pelted by baseballs, the fence would prove barrier enough.
Smoky places unsought are the problem; those sought not so much.
While poking around for a reliable, powerful, bicycle tire pump to keep my mid-sized mountain bike tires up to around 65 psi, I found the following. Comments enabled for anyone who has a pump to recommend. The reviewer is recommending this device.
Reviewed in Canada on July 15, 2019
Don't make me re-play the message a dozen times. Pronounce the string slowly, clearly, and distinctly, numeral by numeral. You are not in a competition to see how fast you can spout it. And then repeat the string. Don't say 'o' if you mean 'zero' (0). 'o' is a letter, '0' is a numeral. Confusing the two is a mark of a linguistically slovenly 'liberal.'
And now you see the fix the Democrats have landed us in, on this, the Eve of Destruction. (The accompanying video is the best I have seen attached to this song.) Joey B in his infinite incompetence, mendacity, and stupidity-cum-dementia has brought people together alright, but the wrong people, the Chi-Coms and the Russkis. Way to go, Joe. And all you useful idiots who voted for him, what were you thinking? You weren't, you were emoting, like good 'liberals.' And now:
Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced in a nearly two-hour speech on Tuesday the unilateral suspension of the longstanding New START agreement that limits American and Russian nuclear development, describing Western support for Ukraine amid an ongoing Russian invasion as an existential threat to Russia.
An exciting, and possibly an exiting development.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Putin bemoaned the “spiritual catastrophe” of the West.
“They distort historical facts and constantly attack our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church, and other traditional religions of our country,” Putin claimed. “Look at what they do with their own peoples: the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion, and the abuse of children are declared the norm. And priests are forced to bless same-sex marriages.”
This is how Putin sees us, and with some justice. We are in grave danger. We would not be had Trump been re-elected.
Tulsi Gabbard talks sense on this issue.
UPDATE (2/23): Russia deploys nuclear-armed ships for first-time in 30 years. Let's go Brandon!
UPDATE (2/23): A U-2 eye's view of the ChiCom spy balloon's massive payload. Let's go Brandon!
It read: 1984 is not an instruction manual.
True, but it may be that some of the novel's dystopian ideas can be turned against the Left.
You'll enjoy it. If you don't, you are not MavPhil material.
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:
Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.
Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.
The last three horrible years make my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:
And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
This is no longer true. We are no longer the "land of the free." You are not free if you cannot express your thoughtful and heart-felt opinions without fear of reprisal. Step out of line and you will be destroyed, if not physically, then politically and economically. Examples are legion. Here is one of an increasing many.
Still and all, we have much something to be grateful for. But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, what remains of our liberty, and our "sweet land of liberty." Patriots are waking up to the depredations of 'Woke' and there is reason to be hopeful. So be of good cheer, do your bit, and long live the Republic! Never give up, never give in, fight hard, and fight to win. There are a lot of us and we can win if we hang together which, to paraphrase a Founder, beats hanging separately.
Here I am. Pay me a visit. I don't quite know the ropes yet.
Who will be Facebook's Elon Musk? Hats off to the latter. Middle finger to the former. Without free speech, republics collapse. Our republic is collapsing and there may be no stopping the slide into the abyss; but as the saying goes, 'it ain't over 'til it's over.' We fight on.
