Category: Varia

The Ever-Increasing Frenzy, Tension, and Explosiveness of this Country

Try to guess when the following was written, and by whom.  Answer below the fold:

Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving.  So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U. S. Catholic about the war article. — some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question — can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates?  Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence.  It is preferable to the uncertainty of 'waiting.' 

 

Continue reading “The Ever-Increasing Frenzy, Tension, and Explosiveness of this Country”

A Platonist at Breakfast

Amazing what one can unearth with the WayBack Machine. This one first saw daylight on 3 March 2005. 

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I head out early one morning with the wife in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon dripping with 1950's Americana. We belly up to the counter and order the $2. 98 special: two eggs any style, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. Meanwhile I punch the buttons for Floyd Cramer’s Last Date on the personal jukebox in front of me after feeding it with a quarter from wifey’s purse.

"How would you like your eggs, sir?" "Over medium, please."

The eggs arrive undercooked. Do I complain? Rhinestone-studded Irene is working her tail off in the early morning rush. I’ve already bugged her for Tabasco sauce, extra butter, and more coffee. The service came with the sweetest of smiles. The place is jumping, the Mexican cooks are sweating, and the philosopher is philosophizing:

"If it won’t matter by tomorrow morning that these eggs are undercooked, why does it matter now?"

With that thought, I liberally douse the undercooked eggs with the fine Louisiana condiment, mix them up with the hashbrowns, and shovel the mess into my mouth with bread and fork, chasing it all with coffee and cream, no sugar.

Who says you can’t do anything with philosophy?

Linkage

The Unhinged Among Us (VDH)

Flannery O'Connor: A Life

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'

Mufti und Der FuehrerHEINRICH 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.

Happy Thanksgiving?

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.

Thanksgiving Happy

Cat Blogging Lives! Tuxies at the Door

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.

Tuxies at the door

How to Write a Good Comment

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.

PROVISIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS
 
Time, Death, and Existence
 
Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited contains many good lines. Here’s one from near the end of the play: “You can’t be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community.” As I take it, “one of the dead” means “one belonging to a community of dead persons.”
 
 
JUNE 27, 2023
 
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So what makes my comment good?
 
1. I interact directly with what the  author has written.
2. In doing so, I show that I have made a good faith attempt to understand him.
3. I tell him whether I agree or disagree and why.
4. I do not go off on irrelevant tangents.
5. I keep my comments brief and to the point.
6. I try to be helpful.
7. I do not use his site to promote myself or to advertise my wares or to dump large undigested quotations from other writers.